


(Don't) Stop Running

by squirenonny



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst, Autistic Pidge | Katie Holt, Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Psychological Horror, Suspense, hunk has anxiety, she/her pronouns for pidge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-22
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-18 00:15:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 35,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13670295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squirenonny/pseuds/squirenonny
Summary: While investigating a rift in spacetime, Pidge and Hunk get stuck in the void between realities, where deadly spores and a glimpse of their own deaths are the least of their worries. Because even if they find their way home, the rift may not let them go.





	1. Into the Rift

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for Event Horizon, the VLD Horror Bang. Written by squirenonny with art by Kintora ([@theproof-is-in-the-pudding](http://theproof-is-in-the-pudding.tumblr.com) on Tumblr.)
> 
> This fic is mostly canon-compliant and is set sometime during season 4, after Pidge has found Matt.
> 
>  **A Note About Trigger Warnings:** I've chosen not to use Archive warnings on this fic because of the nature of the genre. Compared to my other works, this one is fairly heavy on suspense, so if you don't have any major triggers, I'd recommend reading it without even the implied spoilers you'd find in the trigger warnings. If that describes you, go ahead and scroll on down to the start of the story.
> 
> For everyone else, your safety and comfort is most important, so I'm going to break this down into three parts: pervasive triggers, MCD, and a complete list of triggers.
> 
> 1) Pervasive (non-spoilery) trigger warnings: **panic attacks; unreality, paranoia, and hallucinations; and moderately graphic violence including blood and mild gore.** If you're sensitive to any of these things, this probably isn't the fic for you.
> 
> 2) The question of character death: Answered [here](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/private/171108864879/tumblr_p4h692YTsv1ttvln6) for those of you who want minimal spoilers but want to know up front whether anyone dies.
> 
> 3) Full list of trigger warnings (including #1-2), also broken down by chapter, can be found [here.](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/private/171109849089/tumblr_p4h7urWfuI1ttvln6) Major spoilers, obviously.
> 
> Stay safe everyone, and enjoy the fic!

“Bio-rhythm sensors are showing green,” Pidge says, dancing around the precarious nesting of scanners and probes she and Hunk have set up on the lip of the rift. “Hunk?”

A few feet away, Hunk’s buried himself to the waist in an array that’s supposed to give a detailed breakdown of Quintessential composition. One foot sticks high up in the air for balance as he reaches down into the heart of the machine to tweak some wires. “Almost there.” His voice echoes oddly through the metal shell. “You know, this would be a lot easier if the mice were here. Remind me again why the mice aren’t here?”

“Uh, maybe because you guys are in the magical deep-space equivalent of the nuclear hot zone?” Matt suggests. He and Coran are set up a good five hundred feet back, well away from the blazing light and tingling heat of the rift. There’s enough extra layers of protection in the paladin armor to keep Hunk and Pidge from roasting in the energy coming out of the hole in reality itself, provided they don’t actually _touch_ the rift, but the others don’t have that benefit.

Which is why the heavy labor of hauling in all the sensors and setting them up falls on the paladins, while Matt and Coran get to kick back and watch the fireworks on the display screen.

“Ah… hah!” Hunk wobbles, his extended foot catching on the BLIP-tech sensor pod as he extracts himself from the Quintessence mass-spec. Not the _perfect_ analogy, Pidge knows, but a close enough approximation for the sake of keeping all these things straight. She didn’t even realize the castle-ship _had_ half of these machines—and she can’t help feeling a little bit bitter that no one ever bothered to mention them to her.

Pidge steadies the BLIP-tech pod, then grabs Hunk’s elbow as he pops upright, groans, and presses a hand to his head.

“Okay,” he mutters. “Note to self? Massive amounts of Quintessence are _highly_ conducive to bouts of vertigo.”

“Noted,” Pidge says dryly. “Is that everything?” She looks around, taking inventory of their setup. The rest of the team doesn’t know how long they’ll be able to keep Lotor and his generals away from the moon where the rift opened up, which means Team Weird Science has to get in, get as much info as possible, and get out in less than two vargas so they can regroup with the others, form Voltron, and get all Death Star on this moon.

“That’s all of them, Number Five,” Coran calls, flashing her a thumbs-up. “Hold there for a tick while we take our preliminary readings.”

“Roger that,” Hunk says. “I’m just gonna… Go check out Mr. Purple Squishy here.”

Pidge crosses her arms as Hunk crouches beside the glass bell jar they set up to contain the rift spores that have started trickling out of the fissure. There is, of course, an emissions barrier over the entire area, both to delay Lotor realizing what’s here and to keep any of them from suffering the effects of Quintessential overload.

Pidge knows that story, and she’ll pass on turning into Haggar 2.0, thank you very much.

“You know that thing’s dangerous, right?” she asks, watching as Hunk continues to coo at the spore. It’s small and purple and vaguely amoeba-like. Well, if amoeba grew to the size of a small bird. When it pulses, it looks like blood spatter, and Pidge is surprised the sight of it doesn’t make Hunk queasy.

Hunk cranes his neck to scowl at her and turns up his nose. “Uh, no. Come on, Pidge, look at him. He _wuvs me_. Don’t you Mr. Squishy? _Don’t you?_ ”

Vaguely unsettled by the sight of Hunk trying to tickle a trans-reality entity through an inch of glass, Pidge turns her gaze out over the barren landscape. This is the third rift to open since Lotor started smashing the fabric of spacetime with his magic comet-scented hammer. The first two times, Voltron had to destroy the rift before they could study it, or else risk Lotor gaining access.

They still don’t know what Lotor _want_ _s_ with the rifts, but stopping him on principle is probably a good idea.

It’s small, as rifts go—or at least Coran keeps calling it cute and laughing at the notion that it’s a danger to them. The one on Daibazaal was ten times this size at the start, apparently, and Honerva all but lived inside it for twenty-eight decaphebes before the physical and psychological effects became obvious.

So Pidge isn’t too worried about radiation poisoning, or whatever mechanism Quintessence works by. That doesn’t mean it’s smart to go poking at the thing that joined up with a billion of its friends to become the universe’s first Voltron-level threat.

Hunk won’t be dissuaded. While Coran and Matt confer about the readings they’re picking up, Hunk shuffles closer to the edge of the rift, giggling as the rift spore spins circles in its glass prison, butting up against the wall by his finger like a fish in a tank.

Pidge shivers, rubbing her hands along her arms. “It seem cold to you, Hunk?”

“Cold?” Hunk arches an eyebrow at her. “Uh… _no._ I feel like somebody swapped my armor for a sauna over here.”

Pidge frowns, but she’s not imagining it. The temperature inside her suit must have dropped a good ten or fifteen degrees—not exactly arctic weather, but cold enough to raise goosebumps along her arms. Her suit’s display shows no change in the external temperature, though—maybe some malfunction in the armor’s regulation systems? She shuffles a few feet to her right, focusing on her skin and the temperature display, but nothing changes.

“Hey, Coran? Can you check and see if there’s anything wrong with my suit? I think the A/C might have kicked into overdrive or some…thing?” She trails off, the light coming off the rift drawing her attention. It’s hard to see much of anything with light as bright as a bonfire blazing out of the crack in the ground, but she sees… Something.

For a second the glow changes, and instead of a font of light, it’s like Pidge is looking into a mirror. She sees herself—but not herself. The visor of her helmet is smashed, lines of blood running down her face. Her eyes are wide with fear or shock, and--

The image disappears. Pidge blinks furiously, trying to reconcile the strange vision with everything else she’s heard about the rift. Was that a vision of the future? No. Maybe a glimpse into an alternate reality? Coran said that the boundaries between worlds wear thin near the rifts.

Before she can ask whether anyone else saw anything, Matt swears and something starts beeping. “That doesn’t sound encouraging,” she says.

“Hang on a tick,” Coran mutters. “Just a Quintessential surge. Probably nothing...”

Hunk sits back on his heels, trading a look with Pidge. “Probably, he says.”

“Which means he’s wrong, and we should probably be ready for some eldritch horror to come bursting out of the ground.”

“What, like space Cthulhu?” Hunk frowns. “Wait, is that a thing? Is Cthulhu a real thing? What if all those stories come from some real space monster? What if every kid’s nightmare actually exists in another reality, and they can come through the rift? What if--”

“Hunk!” Pidge cries, holding up her hands. “First of all, breathe?” She waits for him to ball his hands into fists, breathing in noisily. “Okay, second, I don’t think Cthulhu’s coming through this rift. _Is he, Matt?_ ”

“Uh…”

Pidge sighs. “That’s very helpful, Matt, thank you.”

“Look, we aren’t really sure _what_ this is.” Matt pauses, the beeping in the background joined now by a second shrill alarm. “We’re picking up some kind of major anomaly, like--”

_T_ _hunk!_

Pidge jumps despite herself. Hunk lets out a little scream and springs back from the rift spore’s prison as its form shivers, backs up, and rams against the glass a second time.

_Thunk!_

Pidge lets out a shaky laugh. “Well _somebody’s_ getting excited,” she says. “Holy hell. Hey, guys? I think we’re going to pull back for a minute, just to be safe.”

Coran waves a hand in acknowledgment. “That’s probably a smart idea. This one seems like a doozy!”

The spore slams against the glass again, more frantically, as if to halt Pidge and Hunk’s retreat. The light streaming from the fissure dims once, twice, like clouds passing in front of the sun.

“Should it be doing that?” Hunk asks. He’s summoned his bayard, though it remains inactive in his hand, and it’s an effort on Pidge’s part not to do the same.

“I don’t know,” Coran says. “We haven’t studied the rifts enough to know what’s ‘normal.’ That was never my area of study to be honest—or Alfor’s.”

Matt hums. “Think we should pull the plug?”

“No,” Pidge says. “We _need_ to know how these rifts form if we want to prevent the fabric of reality turning into metaphysical Swiss cheese, and we need to know what they do in case Lotor ever gets to one before we can destroy it.”

“I suppose...” Matt says. “Still. You should come back here and wait with us until--”

_Crack._

Pidge’s bayard springs into her hand. The rift spore shudders, pressing at the tiny starburst crack it just made in the glass.

“Uh, Coran?” she asks. “You _did_ say we could contain anything that came through the rift, right?”

Coran hesitates. “In theory...”

The spore slams against the crack, sending a new fissure racing across the glass at a steep angle.

“I think this one might be stronger than you were expecting,” Pidge says. She’s frozen, torn between staying to fight the creature off before it can escape and retreating to the relative safety of the lions.

“Okay, forget data collection,” Matt says. “You two need to get back here before we find out what kind of quantum diseases that thing might be carrying.”

“If they’re quantum diseases,” Pidge asks, smirking as she backs away, “would we even be susceptible?”

“Interesting point. I’m sure your immune system doesn’t know what the heck to do with interdimensional microbes, but who’s to say what effect they’d have on you, if they can survive inside your body at all?” Matt hums. “You know what? No. We can debate this later. Just get back here, both of you.”

Pidge hesitates a moment too long. The spore rams the cracked glass one more time, breaking through into open air. Hunk, tugging weakly on Pidge’s arm, suddenly stiffens, his grip turning painful. The spore spins, amorphous droplets fanning out around it then melting back into the main body. Then it stops, pulses once like a beating heart, and launches itself at Hunk.

He screams, stumbling back as the creature darts around him, pressing at the seams in his armor—looking for a way in?

Doesn’t matter. Somewhere nearby, Matt and Coran are yelling. Pidge barely hears them. Her bayard hums in her hand as she studies the thing’s movement, studies Hunk’s flailing hands, waiting for the perfect time to strike, waiting…

She leaps, blade leaving a dark streak across her vision. The spore _screams_ as she shocks it, and it falls to the ground in two wet, limp chunks.

Hunk gags.

“Puke later,” Pidge orders, hauling him away from the rift. “We have to go.”

The light changes.

A glance backward shows her an entire swarm of spores pouring out of the rift, blotting out the light and replacing it with a sickly violet glow that churns as the creatures slide over and around one another. Pidge’s steps slow, but only for a moment as Hunk charges past her and tows her behind him. He mutters to himself, eyes fixed ahead of him and not on the threat behind.

They haven’t even made it halfway to Matt and Coran when the spores descend, splitting into three streams. One spirals toward Matt and Coran, who spring to their feet, Matt raising his staff to meet the attack as Coran dives for the machine that should have been maintaining the barrier over the rift.

The second stream falls between them, a wall of spores ten feet high that blots out everything beyond except for the occasional flash of light when Matt fries another spore on the end of his staff.

There’s not much time to worry about the others, though; the third cluster, and the largest, heads straight for Pidge and Hunk, who opens fire with his bayard. Spores burst in tiny showers of viscous goop, but the swarm shows no signs of weakening. It just keeps coming, even when Pidge joins in, her bayard frying spores by the dozen.

Pidge is so focused on the assault coming from above that she doesn’t notice the spores creeping up on her from behind until they tighten around her foot like a noose. It yanks her backwards, and she cries out as she falls, striking her chin on the bare rock underfoot.

“Pidge!” Hunk cries, spinning toward her. She wants to tell him to focus on the enemy, but she can’t seem to breathe, and the spores—inexplicably clinging together in a thin, glossy black cord—are dragging her toward the light… toward the rift. She flips onto her stomach, clawing at the ground to try to catch herself. Her fingers find a fault in the stone and catch for an instant, and the spores give another great _heave_. Her fingers pop loose, and the rock tears a gash across her palm. She leaves a thin trail of blood on the ground as the spores drag her inch by inch toward the light and heat behind her.

With one last peremptory barrage for the watching spores, Hunk lunges toward her, catching her under the arms. The spores continue to pull at her, wrenching her hip until it feels like her leg is moments from being torn clean off. Screaming, she brings her bayard to bear, aiming carefully for the spore-cord just beyond her foot.

She fires, and her blade bites deep into the stone, slicing cleanly through the spores. The sudden release makes Hunk stumble, but he catches himself and hauls her up. She shakes her leg, dislodging the spores that still cling to her, and winces as she puts pressure on her foot.

Suddenly, she is aware of Matt’s voice in her ear.

“--okay? Pidge!”

“I’m fine,” she says, breathing hard. She slashes at a cluster of spores pressing close to her, then summons her shield to fend off several more. Hunk stands at her back, a warm, solid presence that’s more comforting than she cares to admit. The recoil of his gun thunders through her every time he pulls the trigger, but he stands firm, growling as he takes down more and more of the otherworldly creatures. “You okay out there?”

“Could be worse,” Coran says. “These things don’t seem particularly interested in us.”

“They only attack if we try to get closer to you,” Matt adds. “I think they’re trying to isolate you.”

Hunk snorts. “I think they’ve _succeeded_ in isolating us.”

“We need to break through,” Pidge says. “The longer we stay here, the harder it’s going to be to hold them off.”

Hunk’s steady stream of fire cuts off for a moment, then resumes. “Okay… Okay. Stay close. I’ll try to get us closer to that wall and then we’ll… We’ll…”

“We’ll come up with something,” Pidge says. “Let’s move.”

Her mind is already spinning out ahead of her, trying to come up with a solution. She can’t see any chinks in the spore wall, and she can’t tell how thick it is, but she remembers the cord the creatures formed—solid, strong, and cohesive, despite being made up of distinct creatures. How do they hold together like that? Something on their skin? Do they secrete some kind of adhesive substance, maybe?

 _No,_ Pidge tells herself. _Don’t think about how. Figure out a way through it,_ then _speculate._

Problem is, she doesn’t _know_ how to break through. Matt only has his staff, Coran a small laser pistol. Neither can put much of a dent in the swarm, and neither has ever been able to pilot any of the lions before. Maybe Green will respond to Matt if Pidge is in enough danger, the way Black initially responded to Keith. Maybe one of them will move on its own to help them.

Something _slams_ into Hunk, halting his forward momentum. Pidge stumbles, thrown from her feet by the impact. Her knees scream as they hit the ground, and she has to dismiss her bayard to keep from smashing her faceplate against the rock. She raises her shield as the spores pounce on her moment of distraction, ignoring Hunk’s panicked apologies. Stand up. She has to _stand up._

The second noose catches her by surprise. It closes around her wrist and yanks her forward, pulling her off her feet. She skids across the ground, only catching herself when she’s halfway back to the rift. Hunk lands beside her a moment later, cursing as his bayard skids ahead of him and vanishes in a flash of light.

Pidge trades her shield—useless in her current position face-down—for her bayard, but even as she takes aim another string of spores descends from above, lashing around her wrist and yanking her arm up so her bayard shoots harmlessly into the air.

She kicks, screaming as the things drag her closer to the blazing fissure, but with both hands caught there’s nothing she can do. A third strand encircles her waist, lifting her off the ground.

“Matt!” she screams, mind whiting out as the Quintessence glow of the rift envelopes her. “ _Help!_ ”

A hand closes around her ankle as the physical world ceases to be. All is light and motion, her eyes flickering through a thousand fractured scenes before they adjust to the omnipresent glow of--

The rift.

It hits her as the spores evaporate. Without them, without the ground beneath her, the hand on her ankle is the only thing tying her to her body. She’s in a vast open space, falling—floating? She can’t tell which direction is up, whether there are any physical structures in this space or just the swirling golden clouds.

She _thinks_ they’re clouds, anyway. They’re insubstantial, at least, though they glow with an intense light that reminds Pidge of the refined Quintessence they once found inside a Galra processing plant. Is _that_ what this place is? Pure Quintessence, so dense it gathers in spurts and streams that churn around her like schools of fish swimming in a great, wide nothingness?

“Oh my god,” Hunk whispers. A second hand joins the first on Pidge’s foot, reminding her of what just happened. She twists, trying to look down (up?) at Hunk. It’s like the day the castle was taken over by the corrupted crystal and the gravity generators in Green’s hangar switched off. They drift, weightless, the jagged scar of the rift visible some distance beyond Hunk, so dark against the golden glow it looks almost black.

“What the fuck?” Pidge whispers. “What the _fuck?_ ”

Hunk turns a slow circle, his hands clinging to Pidge’s leg. He seems to be trying to climb her, which would be adorable if they weren’t floating in a weird yellow pocket dimension with—yep, those are rift spores drifting out among the Quintessence clouds. Watching. Pidge’s wrist still throbs from that last game of tug-o-war.

“Are we—? Did we just—?” Hunk’s eyes widen, and he twists so fast he momentarily lets go of Pidge, who yelps and flails and just manages to catch hold of his arm before they’re separated.

“Don’t let go of me, Hunk!” she cries. “If we get separated in here, we’re dead.”

Poor choice of words.

Hunk’s face goes ashen, his hands clamping down on Pidge’s arms. He yanks her toward him so hard their helmets smack together, leaving Pidge dizzy and disoriented. The clouds around them grow more agitated at the disturbance, a few tentative tendrils reaching out toward them.

Hunk squeaks, firing his jetpack to get them away from the tendrils. They shoot deeper into the void, twining through yellow vapor and clusters of dark violet spores that perk up at their approach, then flee as they barrel on through. Pidge loses track of herself, and of the dark spot in the sky that marks their way home.

“Hunk!” she cries, clinging to him as he pushes them faster. The sudden turns and the terrifying speeds white out the edges of Pidge’s vision, and all she catches are flashes of gold and violet and stars. Alien planets appear before her, and the castle-ship, and Green—only it’s not Green. It looks like her, but where there should be a familiar presence, warm like sunlight on leaves, sibilant like birdcall and rushing water, there’s only darkness and decay.

They speed on, and Pidge continues to see strange visions in the clouds flickering by. She sees herself, awash in the frosty glow of a computer screen. She sees her team, older than she remembers them, dressed in battered armor but laughing as they file out of their lions and greet each other with exuberant embraces. She sees her mother, dressed in strange clothing and wielding a Galra rifle, her face a mask of fury. She sees—

“Dad?”

The word tumbles out of her in a rush of surprise, and she twists in Hunk’s hold, tugging at his hands, screaming words she can’t hear. She doesn’t know what she’s saying, except that they have to go back. They have to find him. They have to _find him._

They stop.

Pidge slams into Hunk, grunting as his shoulder digs into her stomach, and she wonders what she said that finally got through to him.

Then she hears him gasping for air, faint moans escaping him. He’s rigid, his eyes fixed on something up ahead, something that makes his hands shake and his breath come in uneven spurts. He gags, twists, and Pidge sees them.

Corpses.

Floating there, glassy-eyed and coated in too-bright blood in the center of a thick haze of yellow, are three corpses. She sees Hunk first, eyes closed, face peaceful. It might have seemed like he was asleep if not for the ragged hole through his chest. Beside him is Pidge herself, a scream frozen on her face, her gloves burned away and her palms stained black with char.

A sudden spike of heat and fear burrows into Pidge’s skin and she turns away, squeezing her eyes shut. She doesn’t want to see that. She doesn’t want to see who else died.

“It’s another reality,” she whispers. Hunk lets go of Pidge with one hand to claw at his helmet as he retches again, his eyes screwed shut, his hand shaking so bad he’s having trouble with the catch.

Pidge pries his hand away from his helmet. “No! Hunk, stop it!”

“I can’t,” he gasps. “I can’t, Pidge, I—I have to—That was us. Oh my god, that was us. We were dead and that was us and we’re _dead_ , Pidge, we’re—”

“ _Stop_ ,” she growls, shaking him as best she can with no leverage. “Hunk, listen to me. You have to breathe. You can’t take off your helmet here; we’re surrounded by pure Quintessence. There’s no telling what would happen if you breathed it in! You remember Coran’s story about Zarkon and Honerva?”

Hunk freezes, his eyes finding her face slowly. “You mean we’re turning into space zombies?”

“Not if you stay calm and work with me. Our suits will protect us, Hunk, but we’ve got to find our way back to the rift where we came in.” She has no idea if that’s possible, or if their armor provides any protection at all. But Hunk is listening to her; listening and breathing more steadily than he has since the spores first attacked. “Okay,” she says, pointing toward a patch of vapor that seems moderately thinner than the rest. “We came that way, so that’s the way we have to go. You with me, Hunk?”

“Uh...” His eyes drift to the side, and he starts to turn back toward the vision of their dead bodies.

Pidge grabs his helmet. “Don’t,” she says. He stares at her, wide-eyed. “Alternate realities, Hunk. It’s better not to know.”

He nods slowly, drawing in a shuddering breath. “Okay.”

Pidge smiles, and they turn themselves back the way they came, maneuvering with their jet packs. They grip each other’s forearms, lock eyes, and set off. As they do, Pidge notices a stream of gold coalescing on her right hand. Curious, she lifts her arm to study the mist.

The palm of her glove has a long tear through it, and the skin beneath is broken by a long, thin red stripe.

The rocks. She cut her hand on the rocks when she was fighting against the spores’ pull.

The Quintessence prods at the wound, and Pidge flails her hand, trying to shake it off, for all the good it does. The Quintessence streams into the wound like a sliver of pure ice, and Pidge draws in a sharp breath.

Hunk turns, concern in his eyes, and Pidge hides her hand behind her back. “Alternate realities,” she says brightly. “Nothing to worry about.”

Only when he turns forward again does Pidge risk a second glance at her hand. The wound is gone, the skin fresh and pale as if she never cut it at all. The Quintessence clings to her hand like a second skin, glowing softly.

_Well that can’t be good._

* * *

“Anything?” Matt asks, breathless. The research site is in disarray, monitors smashed and sparking, sensors offline. Coran still has his palm-sized tablet, which acts as a kind of central collection point for data from their two dozen sensors, and he’s combing through the readouts as he hails the Castle of Lions to let them know what happened. Matt, meanwhile, is trying to fix the machinery that was damaged in the hope that the sensors are still in working order. If Coran can get more data, they stand a better chance of finding out where Hunk and Pidge went and how to get them back.

“Nothing,” Coran says.

Matt swears. His hands are shaking so bad he can barely hold the Altean multi-tool he’s using in his repairs, and he drops the wire three times before he manages to reattach it. Pidge is gone. Pidge is hurting. Those _things_ took her and dragged her, screaming, into the rift. He can still hear it, that scream. His baby sister, crying out for him. Coran had to grab Matt around the waist when the spores finally retreated, or Matt would’ve dived right into the rift after her, never mind he has no better way to get back out than the paladins, never mind that he doesn’t even have their armor to protect himself.

Pidge needs him.

Swearing, Matt pounds on the side of the monitor, and finally— _finally_ the power light flickers on. Coran gives a wordless cry of triumph as the sensors reconnect.

“It’s holding?” Matt asks, already scrambling to his feet. He barely waits for Coran’s nod before he takes off toward the shattered receiver that corresponds to the Quintessence array. Coran is already scanning for biorhythms, heat signatures, and comms signals—all dead or overloaded by the rift itself—and though they aren’t likely to pick up one specific Quintessential signature through the roar of energy pouring out of the hole in the universe, this sensor is more likely to respond to Hunk and Pidge than the ones for gravity, radiation, or temporal dilation.

“All right,” Coran breathes. His voice is soft, and Matt realizes belatedly that he’s speaking into the comms. “All right. Just—hurry.”

Matt rips the cover off the receiver and starts digging trough, trying to figure out what’s salvageable. “What was that?”

“Lance is on his way,” Coran says. “The rest of them are still trying to hold off Lotor, but the Red Lion is the fastest vessel we have, short of opening a wormhole directly to this location.”

“How long are we talking here?”

“Ten doboshes?” Coran guesses. “Perhaps longer.”

Matt grimaces. “Let’s just hope that’s fast enough.”

* * *

Hunk doesn’t know where he is.

He supposes, after charging off in a panic, that’s only to be expected, but it still sets his nerves on edge. There are no landmarks in this place, no magnetic poles for his suit’s analogue compass to align with, no signal from his lion or the castle-ship to orient the Altean positioning systems. There isn’t even gravity to give a definite answer on “up” and “down.” Just glowing yellow fog as far as the eye can see and the occasional shadows where swarms of rift spores pass.

“Are you sure we’re headed the right direction?” he asks. He knows he’s holding too tight to Pidge’s hand as they cruise through the fog, but she’s the only concrete thing in this place; if he loses her, reality itself might lose its shape.

Pidge eases up on her jets, letting Hunk catch up to her. She seems to know better than Hunk which way they came—or at least, she’s better at putting on a show of confidence—so he lets her set their course and their pace. They seem to be going too slowly for all Pidge’s talk of Quintessential overload and other dangers of extra-dimensional spaces, but that might just be Hunk’s anxiety nipping at his heels.

“As sure as I can be,” Pidge says, looking thoughtful. “Coran theorized that the rift isn’t a universe in its own right, only the primordial soup between realities, and that might make things like spacetime a little more fluid than we’re used to.”

Hunk isn’t sure he likes the sound of that. “So, what? We’re lost?”

Pidge stills, seeming to register her words for the first time. She cringes. “Uh… not exactly? More like… heading in _exactly_ the right direction isn’t necessarily that important. Or possible.”

Hunk moans. “That’s not helping, Pidge.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

There’s nothing to do but to move on. They might be putting themselves even farther from escape without realizing it, but at least they aren’t just sitting there, waiting to die. The spores stay always in the corner of Hunk’s eye, dark shadows watching him with predatory intent. They make no move to attack, but Hunk still aches where they latched onto his arm and pulled him into the rift. What do they want with them, anyway? Why take them if not to eat them? Is this some kind of game to them? Do they get off on watching people search for an escape, watching them die, lost and alone?

His stomach churns, and he tries to make himself focus on the comms. They lost contact with Matt and Coran when they entered the rift, and though all the armor’s systems appear to be in working order, Hunk isn’t sure he trusts anything in this place. He fiddles with the manual controls on the side of his helmet as they move. It would be easier if he could see what he was doing, or if he had two hands, but things being what they are…

There’s definitely power to the comms, but even when he boosts the signal, all he gets is a burst of static. Probably that’s because Altean tech can’t transmit through the border of their reality—but there’s a chance that the rift only distorts the frequency. If he can compensate for that—if the distortion is small enough that his suit is _able_ to compensate for that—then maybe they can reestablish a connection.

“Hello?” he calls, keeping his touch on the frequency dial light. “Coran? Matt? Can you hear us?” He waits for a count of three, then tries again. “Coran? Matt? Anyone there?”

Nothing.

Hunk twists the dial and tries again, wishing he’d spent more time studying the comms network. He doesn’t know how sensitive to fluxuations in frequency these devices are.

A flash of blue catches Hunk’s eye, and he glances toward it, his mind still turning through the inner workings of the comms, trying to gauge how quickly he dares cycle through test frequencies. It would be best if Matt and Coran keep up a steady transmission on their end, but Hunk isn’t sure how long they’ve already been in here. More than five or ten minutes, and the others might have given up on reestablishing communication. But if the distortion is more than a couple of megahertz—or, well, tremph, the Altean unit—then Hunk could be at this for hours.

He’s so caught up in his thoughts that he stares at the figure in the distance for a good fifteen seconds before he realizes what he’s seeing.

“Lance?” Hunk flips around, firing his jets to slow Pidge’s forward momentum. “Lance!”

Pidge’s head whips around. “Lance?” she demands. “Where?”

“There!” Hunk points toward the figure. White armor, blue accents. He keeps drifting in and out of sight behind clouds of Quintessence and swarms of spores, but there’s no mistaking that armor. “Lance! Wait, quiznak, I’m on the wrong frequency. Pidge--”

“Lance!” Pidge bellows, the sound loud enough to startle a cluster of nearby spores, which go momentarily spiky before they dart off. “Lance, behind you!”

Lance turns slowly. He’s drifting, scanning the rift around him for signs of Hunk and Pidge, but gives no sign that he heard Pidge’s call.

“Something’s wrong,” Pidge says.

 _Yeah, no kidding._ Hunk works himself up to a snarky retort, only to have the words stolen from his lungs when a patch of fog obscures Lance from view. When it passes, he’s gone.

“No!”

Pidge swears, taking off in Lance’s direction. Hunk flails, then gets himself under control and adds his jets to hers, eyes sweeping the glow around them as they hurtle across the open space. Lance has to be _somewhere_. He can’t just disappear— can he? Just how fluid _is_ spacetime in here?

But there’s nothing. No fleck of blue, no burn of jets, no voice on the comms. It’s hard to judge distance in here, but they slow somewhere near where they saw Lance, by Hunk’s best estimate.

“Where’d he go?” Hunk asks. “Do you think…?”

He’s not sure how to finish the sentence, with every option equally bleak.

“I… I don’t know, Hunk.” Pidge edges closer to him, and he catches her other arm to steady her. “Maybe… Maybe that wasn’t really him. You’ve been seeing the other realities in the clouds?”

Hunk wishes he weren’t. As if seeing his own dead body isn’t bad enough, he’s caught glimpses of other scenes that might as well have been torn straight out of his nightmares. Monstrous creatures, horrific wounds, armies a hundred times anything Zarkon could mount.

“He was here,” Hunk protests. Even to himself, the words sound weak. “He _looked_ real.”

“Nothing looks real to me right now.” Pidge straightens, glances around, then takes off at an angle back toward their original trajectory. They’d probably be just as well off picking a direction at random.

Minutes pass. Hours, maybe. Nothing changes, or maybe everything does. The rift is so nebulous Hunk isn’t entirely certain there’s a difference. They fly long enough that Hunk’s mouth runs dry and his throat aches from the constant calls for his friends. The numbers on his comms display climb slowly, but the static never breaks.

Eventually Pidge begins to flag, her breath turning shallow and quick, as though she’s just run a marathon.

“I’m fine,” she grunts when Hunk mentions it. “Just—keep calling. I think I managed to get some of my scanners back on line. Not sure how _accurate_ they are, but… Oh my god. Is that…?”

She trails off, and Hunk’s heart leaps into his throat. “Pidge?”

“This way!” Pidge cries, tucking and turning like an Olympic swimmer—except, of course, there’s no wall to push off here, and with Hunk’s jets still firing at a different angle, they swing wide for a moment, Hunk’s shoulder screaming as the force tries to rip Pidge away from him.

He holds on, and they slam together, leaving Pidge winded and Hunk dizzy. Static still buzzes in his ears.

Shaking her head, Pidge takes off again without a word, plunging through clouds and spores until, up ahead, they spot it: a great, black scar in the sky. A crack in reality itself.

The rift.

Hunk could cry. “Is that--?”

“Hell yeah it is! Let’s go!”

They’re halfway there before Hunk’s mind starts working again. He pulls Pidge to a stop. “Wait! Lance is still in here.”

“No he’s not. That was an alternate reality, same as everything else.”

“Are you sure about that?”

Pidge hesitates.

“Yeah,” Hunk says. “That’s what I thought. We can’t leave him in here, Pidge.”

“And how are we supposed to _find_ him? How are we supposed to find _this_ again afterwards?” She gestures helplessly at the rift. Hunk can see it in her eyes. The fear, yes, but also the determination.

Heart hammering, he meet her eyes and lets go of her arm. “Go,” he says. “I’ll find Lance. You can come back for us both.”

“Are you _crazy?_ You can’t—”

Something bowls into him, tumbling him end over end, and the static in his ears builds to a crescendo. He hears screaming underneath the roar, but he can’t tell where it’s coming from. All around him is black. Black and violet and a ceaseless, furious motion like a billion maggots writhing all around him.

_Spores._

Hunk gives a choked cry, flailing. He summons his bayard, but they swarm over the surface of it, ripping it from his grasp before he can pull the trigger. They press at his neck, at his visor, whispering with a sound on the edge of reason, calling to him.

A streak of green slices through the darkness. “Hunk!” Pidge cries. He can see her now, fighting her way toward him, slashing at the spores that keep pouring in, more agitated than they were before (and why now? Why only attack _now?_ )

Pidge’s hand breaks through the writhing mass, a blessing wrapped in the golden glow of Quintessence, and Hunk latches on, screaming in terror as Pidge spins and fires her bayard at the rift. It plunges into the surface like the rift is a pool of ink, its glow vanishing abruptly, and Hunk fears the worst.

The line snaps taut.

The first jerk forward comes so suddenly, and there are still so many spores writhing against his armor, that Hunk almost loses his hold on Pidge. But with one last, desperate surge of strength, he pulls himself toward her, grimacing as she shouts out in pain, and wraps himself around her. They plunge together into the rift—

—and land hard on bare rock.

“ _Pidge!_ ”

Matt’s voice breaks through the ringing in Hunk’s ears. With his head spinning as bad as it is, Hunk doesn’t dare sit up, can hardly open his eyes without nausea rising in his throat. Thin, strong hands grip him under the arms, hauling him backwards, away from the flickering light.

“What—?” Hunk breaks off as his dry throat makes itself known. The coughs that overtake him are weak, but they make his whole body protest. He doesn’t fight the hands that hold him down when he tries to move.

“Shh,” Coran whispers. “You’re all right. Just take it easy.”

Groaning as the contents of his stomach try to make a reappearance, Hunk cracks his eyes open. Somehow, despite the world being far darker than what it was inside the rift—dark enough that Hunk has to blink a few times before he can pick out any details—his head still pounds at every flicker of light, most noticeably the glow of the rift behind him.

“Coran?”

Coran leans over him, smiling sadly. There are tight lines around his eyes—and are those tears on his cheeks? He glances back toward the rift, holding his breath like he’s waiting for something, then sighs and turns back to Hunk. “How are you feeling?”

“Like somebody just used me as a chew toy,” Hunk grumbles. He forces himself upright, against the better judgment of the rest of his body, and glances over to where Matt and Pidge form a tangle of indistinguishable limbs. In the relative darkness, they look like a single multi-limbed creature of pale and dark.

“You’re alive,” Matt sobs, clinging to Pidge and repeating the words over and over.

Hunk’s vision blurs, and he groans, barely catching himself before he hits the ground.

“All right,” Coran says. “Take it easy now. You two deserve a good long rest after...” He hesitates, and Hunk fights a nonsensical urge to giggle.

 _Yeah,_ he thinks, _I’m not exactly sure what to call that, either._

With Coran’s help, Hunk manages to gain his feet, though he sways dangerously and nearly ends up right back on the ground. He _feels_ the rift behind him, watching him with a hunger that’s entirely too intelligent to be safe.

The Yellow Lion purrs a question in Hunk’s head, tentative and afraid. Hunk reaches out on instinct to reassure him, and the force of Yellow’s relief leaves him feeling gutted. He lifts his head, scanning the horizon for the lion’s familiar bulk.

Three lions stare back at him, and dread coils in his gut.

“Lance.”

Beside him, Coran stiffens. Hunk turns to him, fluttering heart rattling in its cage.

“Lance,” he says again. “Where is he? Is he here? Is he—oh, God, he came after us, didn’t he?”

“Hunk, he—” Matt cuts off at a sharp gesture from Coran, who ducks his head to look Hunk in the eyes.

“Why do you ask?”

Hunk jerks back—and, oh god, that’s a mistake. His head pounds, images of the other realities pressing at him. Images of Lance, alone in the rift, looking for _him._ Hunk left him behind—his best friend. “What do you _mean_ why do I ask?” he demands , edging toward hyperventilation. “That’s his _lion_ , isn’t it?”

Coran lifts his head toward the lions, frowning. He glances toward Pidge and Matt. “Quintessence overload,” he says. “It’s known to cause hallucinations.”

“No,” Pidge says. She sounds halfway past woozy, teetering on the edge of incoherent. “No, Hunk’s right. Green, Yellow, Red—like a traffic light!”

For some reason, that only makes Coran look _more_ confused, and Hunk looks back at the lions. They aren’t seeing things… are they? Red _looks_ real—but so did everything in the rift.

“We saw him in there,” Hunk says weakly. “He was _right there._ We have to go back.”

But as he tries to pull away from Coran, the vertigo hits him hard. He stumbles, his vision going dark.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Coran says. “Unless it’s into a bed. We’ll figure this all out when you’re feeling better.”

“But...”

He should protest. He should argue. Lance is… _Lance…_ is…

Hunk can’t remember what Lance is. Something claws at his throat, but it’s a distant sensation, and he can’t remember why it matters. He’s so, so tired.

He loses track of himself for a moment, and when the world reasserts itself, he’s lying on something hard and flat, red and gold clouds passing by overhead. Coran and Matt talk in low voices, words slurring together somewhere beyond Hunk’s comprehension.

Yellow purrs in his mind. _**It will be okay, cub.** _ He doesn’t sound very sure of himself.

The shadows close in, restless, like living things, and as Hunk’s consciousness fades, it seems to him that someone else has joined their procession. Someone with cold hands and eyes that leak golden embers. It’s there for only an instant, and then the darkness sweeps in and washes the watchful eyes away.


	2. Quarantine

_Thump._

Hunk’s eyes snap open. Darkness surrounds him, and heavy silence presses on his ears. The sound that woke him reverberates in his chest, kickstarting his heart. The hairs along the back of his neck prickle as something unseen sneaks up on him on silent feet.

 _Don’t be ridiculous,_ he tells himself, forcing even breaths past the torrent of his fear. His mind is hazy with interrupted sleep, and the edges of the dream cling to him. Floating black creatures dragging him toward a hole in reality. His own dead body. Quiznak, all this time in deep space, where the stuff of urban legends take space-yoga classes with cryptids, is starting to get to his head. The nightmares aren’t new, but he could do without the horror movie twists.

Groaning, he rolls onto his back, squinting into the darkness of his room— _his_ room? Something about the space feels off. The faint illumination strips along the base of the wall are on the wrong side of the bed...aren’t they? And they should be blue, not pale yellow.

A violet shadow passes between Hunk and the illuminating strips, and his heart slams to a stop in his chest. He shoots upright with a strangled cry, hand reaching for his bayard even as the rest of him fights with the bed sheets. He needs to run—needs to protect himself—maybe if he charges the _thing_ he can scare it into leaving him alone. Maybe—

“Shhh! Goddamnit, Hunk, keep it down!”

Hunk stills, heartbeat thundering in his ears. “Pidge?”

A glowing blue screen flickers into existence above Pidge’s arm, illuminating her face. (In all honesty, Hunk would almost take the darkness over the ghost story lighting, but at least he can see her now.) Hunk moves toward her, fully intent on counteracting the terror of her rude wake-up call with a hug, but one of his feet is still tangled in the blankets, and he ends up more falling on top of Pidge than lifting her off her feet.

She wheezes as he rolls off her. “If this is your way of telling me not to wake you up by dropping from the ceiling… message received.”

Hunk cringes. “Sorry. Wait… The ceiling?” He tips his head back, and the glow of Pidge’s screen shows a dark hole at the top of the wall: a vent with the cover dangling from one screw. “Uh, Pidge? Is there a _reason_ you snuck into my room though the air vents at...” He turns to look for his clock, and realizes abruptly that this is _not_ his room. There’s a narrow bed against the wall, an empty nightstand beside it, and a single door. None of it is familiar. “Where are we?”

“I don’t know,” Pidge says. “But I don’t like it. How much do you remember?”

Hunk thinks of the dream that apparently wasn’t anything as simple as a dream, after all. “Enough to know I’d rather not remember anything.”

Pidge laughs weakly, her face pale in the blue light of her screen. Hunk almost asks why she didn’t just turn on the overhead light, but decides questions can take a back seat to hugs. Pidge looks an inch from crawling out of her skin and about three hours past exhausted, and Hunk is honestly impressed she hasn’t either burst into tears or broken down screaming. She doesn’t resist when he pulls her into a hug, though their shadows in the light coming off her wrist make strange shapes on the wall.

It’s only once they shuffle back to the bed and sit down, huddled together against the wall with a blanket pulled over both their laps, that Hunk finally ventures a question.

“Okay, so I remember coming out of the rift, and… Red. You said you saw her, right?”

Pidge nods. “Yeah, and Matt and Coran were being all weird about it?” She pulls her knees up to her chest and nestles in under Hunk’s arm. “That’s problem number one. I haven’t seen Lance yet, but… I don’t know.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “I don’t like it.”

Neither does Hunk, honestly, and he has a queasy sort of feeling he knows why. He _saw_ Lance in the rift, looking for them. Pidge can say whatever she wants; it wasn’t a glimpse of another reality. If Lance is stuck in there—if they can’t get him back—

He can’t say any of this to Pidge, of course. She was the one to argue in favor of getting themselves out, then returning with the lions if it turned out Lance really did chase after them. If anything happened to Lance in the rift, she’ll blame herself. “Okay,” Hunk says, rubbing circles on her back. “Okay. I’m pretty sure I passed out right around them. Do you have any idea where we are?”

“Only that it’s a ship, and it’s not the castle,” Pidge says. “I was out of it for a while, too. Woke up once in an elevator, I think. Matt was carrying me. He looked...” She trails off. Hunk thinks of the way Matt clung to her when they first came out of the rift. Matt’s always saying how scared he was when everything first began, how he broke down after the rebels freed him—and of course he was a mess when he got Pidge back. They both were.

Hunk has never seen him this vulnerable, though.

“How long do you think we were in there?”

Pidge’s hand goes to her hair then, and Hunk frowns. Pidge looks up at him, then ducks her head. “You can’t see it in this light, can you?”

“Can’t see what?”

“My hair,” she says. “It turned white—some of it, anyway. Yours, too. You look a like a more bad-ass Reed Richards. I just look like Draco Malfoy stuck his wand in an electrical outlet.”

Hunk snorts, though his stomach squirms with the need to get up, find a mirror and some proper lighting, and see where exactly on the sliding scale of Shiro to Haggar his stress dye job has landed him.

“...Sorry,” Pidge mutters. “I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

Hunk shakes his head, pulling Pidge closer to combat the way the whole of his body feels like a plaster cast that’s half-dried and already too tight. “Better to know now than have it catch me by surprise later,” he says. White hair. It’s such a strange thought, unnerving despite a year spent with Shiro and Allura. It doesn’t matter… but it sort of does. “So we spent a while in the rift, came back, passed out, and they brought us to some weird ship neither of us have ever seen… I mean, that’s weird and creepy, and I’d certainly like to find out what the heck is going on and whether I should be composing my last will and testament—” He tries for humor in this statement, but he has a feeling it falls flat, if the way Pidge tenses beside him is any indication. “But how do you get from that to crawling through the air ducts and scaring the quiznak out of me at some unknown hour in the middle of the night cycle?”

“You mean you can’t feel it?”

Hunk stares down at the top of her head. “Can’t feel what?”

“They’re watching us.”

A chill seeps down Hunk’s back, freezing his bones. He can’t stop staring at Pidge’s hair, can’t make himself exhale the breath growing stale in his lungs. His eyes—the only part of him he can move—dart toward the upper corners of the room, searching for the telltale red glow of a security camera.

“The team?” he whispers.

“I don’t…” Pidge breathes in, then uncoils. It seems to take a deliberate effort, her toes poking out past the edge of the blanket as she straightens her legs. “I don’t know. I hope so.”

Hunk tries not to think of what _else_ might be watching. Dark shapes and glowing eyes poke at the corners of his mind, lurking in a memory from right before he passed out, when he was teetering on a dream and probably imagining things that weren’t there.

Still, he’s sure there was someone else there. Not Matt or Coran, not Pidge, not Lance. Someone… slippery. Someone who seemed to only half exist.

“We should talk to the others,” Hunk says. “Get some answers. We’ll never get anywhere otherwise.”

Pidge hesitates, then nods. She doesn’t say anything, but considering how close she sticks beside him as they stand up, he thinks maybe all she really needs is someone to come with her when she explores the ship. Which is odd—Pidge isn’t normally one to let her fear rule her—but nothing about this situation is right.

Sticking together seems like a very good idea just now.

Neither of them has their armor or their bayards; their rooms are empty except the black undersuits they both wear, the bracelet-mounted computer Pidge is already using, and a tablet full of mechanical texts that Hunk leaves in the drawer of his nightstand. He’d feel better if he were armed, but there’s no helping that now.

“Ready?” he asks.

Pidge nods, hitting the door controls. The bright lights of the corridor smack Hunk across the face, and he lags behind Pidge as she strides out of the bedroom. He blinks furiously, one hand held out in front of him as he stumbles along, hoping he doesn’t break his nose on a wall. _That_ would be a perfect end to today.

“ _Get out._ ”

Hunk whirls, forgetting the brightness of the lights as he searches for the owner of the voice. The hallway behind him is empty, the nearest door ten feet away—too far for someone to have hidden themself already. It sounded like they whispered directly into his ear, the voice more a hiss than anything else, seething with anger that makes Hunk want to shrink away.

“Hunk?” Pidge calls. “You okay?”

Hunk raises a hand to the side of his neck, feeling the bare skin there beneath the smooth material of his undersuit and fully expecting to find one of the rift spores clinging to him, _talking_ to him.

 _Get your head together, man,_ Hunk tells himself, pinching the curve where shoulder meets neck in an effort to disguise the way his hands are shaking. “Fine,” he tells Pidge. It’s a struggle to tear his eyes away from the empty hallway, but he manages it, and even tries for a smile. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”

They continue without a word, and Pidge graciously doesn’t comment when Hunk lets out a frightened shout at the sound of the air cycler turning on—slow, scraping swipes that sound entirely too much like claws pulling something heavy through the ducts.

 _Nothing,_ he tells himself. _There’s nothing there. Stop being so paranoid._

* * *

Pidge can’t shake the feeling she’s being watched. It lessened slightly while she sat with Hunk, enough that she nearly convinced herself it’s just another shitty side-effect of her Quintessence bath. Hopefully a temporary one at that, though time hasn’t calmed the electrical storm of energy that shocked her awake and had her ripping off ceiling panels in her room in search of hidden cameras for an hour before she fled to the vents.

Luckily, Hunk hasn’t noticed her cracked and bleeding nails. If she can keep him distracted for another half hour or so, the wounds will probably disappear on their own; they’ve already mostly closed up. Pidge might have imagined the golden sheen to the dried blood staining her cuticles, but she doesn’t think so.

Quintessence overload.

Not as extensive a case as hit Zarkon and Honerva ten thousand years ago—thank god—but that only means that Pidge is treading new ground, like Madam Curie. But with magic instead of radiation.

It isn’t a comforting thought.

Pidge and Hunk wander the bright, sterile corridors of the strange ship with no clear destination in mind. They encounter no one, which wouldn’t be a terrible surprise except that this ship is a fraction the size of the castle: just two decks, the lower made up of a half dozen crew quarters like the room Pidge woke up in, a rec room, and a galley. The upper deck holds the engine room, a med bay, and a single long corridor that must lead to the bridge.

Every few minutes, Hunk twitches like he wants to look over his shoulder, and Pidge’s eyes are always on the ceiling, searching for cameras. She can’t see any, but they’re there. She _knows_ they are.

She hears Matt halfway down the corridor to the bridge.

“...resting,” Matt is saying. “Coran says they’re doing okay, all things considered.”

Pidge’s steps slow, and she reaches out to grab Hunk’s arm before he can walk in on the conversation. He starts to say something, but stops when Pidge presses a finger to her lips. Matt isn’t quite whispering, but the low lights and the way the answering voice—Keith’s, Pidge thinks—stay just below an intelligible volume lend the scene an air of secrecy that rankles Pidge’s already frayed nerves.

She has a feeling they’ll stop talking as soon as they see her or Hunk, so she has to be careful. She creeps forward and is honestly surprised to see both Matt and Coran inside, wholly focused on the comms screen where Keith stands, face haggard. It's too dark on his side to tell where he is--Blade headquarters, or maybe his fighter. He's slumped, hair a sweaty, tousled mess. None of them notice Pidge, and none of them is watching camera feeds. But that means… If _they_ aren’t the ones watching her…

The temperature in the hallway drops, and her skin prickles in anticipation of a touch. She turns, but it’s only Hunk, his face a mask of confusion.

 _Lance,_ she tells herself. _Or Shiro, or Allura. One of them is watching the cameras. They’re probably already planning a lecture about eavesdropping._

“It’s probably for the best,” Coran says, forced cheer drawing Pidge’s mind off her unseen watcher. “No reason for them to have to endure the next seventeen vargas with the rest of us.”

“Seventeen vargas?” Hunk whispers. “What’s happening in seventeen vargas?”

Pidge shakes her head.

On the screen, Keith rubs red eyes with the back of his hand. “And… it was just the two of them? The rift didn’t…? What makes them special?”

“I don’t know,” Matt says. “Maybe because we can’t form Voltron without them?”

Keith freezes, his lips turning down into a deep scowl, and Matt raises his hands.

“Sorry. But it’s the only reason we can think that the rift—or whatever entity lives inside it—would pick out Hunk and Pidge specifically. Unless it’s completely arbitrary,” Matt concedes. His voice drops low, and Pidge has to strain to hear it. “I don’t know if that would make this all better or worse.”

With a heavy sigh, Keith deflates. “We’ll probably never know either way. I’m not planning on letting any of this happen again. Do they… Do they know? About…?”

“No.” It’s Coran who speaks this time, his voice as dull as Pidge has ever heard it. “They didn’t seem to remember much of anything when we pulled them out, though they _were_ fairly disoriented. It’s possible their memories will return after they wake up.”

“Well, if they _don’t_ remember, we’re not telling them,” Matt says. “Not yet. They’re still pretty…”

He trails off, and Pidge’s fingers tighten around the edge of the doorway. The storm in her core has picked up speed, whipping through her with thoughts of leaping into the light, of challenging her brother, of demanding answers to all her questions. They have no right to lie to her about any of this.

Growling softly, Pidge leaves the shelter of the hallway and stalks forward. Keith sees her first, blanching and jerking back like he’s been slapped.

“Pidge,” he whispers. “You’re… you’re awake.”

She smiles tightly as Matt and Coran whip around, guilt and relief weighing down their shoulders. She feels Hunk keeping pace behind her, still just as flighty as he was on the way up here. “Surprise,” she says dryly. “Please, don’t stop on account of us. You were saying you wanted to not tell us something because we’re still pretty… what?”

No one answers, and Pidge feels her ire building, churning inside her like lightning begging to be unleashed. She’s just been kidnapped by spores, dragged into the rift, pumped full of Quintessence, and now her friends want to coddle her? _Now?_

Hunk rests a hand on her arm as she opens her mouth to snap at the others, and she falters, looking up at him.

“Where are we?” he asks. His voice stays surprisingly calm, though it shakes with the same fear that makes his grip on her arm a vice. “Why aren’t we on the castle? How long were we out?”

Matt and Coran glance at each other, then turn to Keith, who pinches the bridge of his nose. “You’re on a ship called the _Roniro_. Matt’s rebel friends let us borrow it, since the engines don’t work.”

“The engines _what_?” Hunk’s voice cracks on the last word. “What do you mean the engines don’t work? What if Lotor finds us? Do we at least have our lions?”

“You do,” Keith says, “though it’s probably best if you don’t leave the _Roniro_ for a little while. Besides, you’re drifting out in the Farreil Cluster. There’s enough interference from the spiiva asteroids in the area to hide you from Lotor’s scanners, and he’s got no reason to be looking in that direction anyway.”

Pidge shakes off Hunk’s weakening hold and stalks forward. “Okay, but why are we _here_? Why aren’t we back on the castle with everyone else? Did something happen with Lotor?”

“We’re handling it,” Keith says curtly. “Right now I’m more worried about you.”

“Obviously,” Pidge mutters. “That’s why you’ve stranded us in deep space with no exit strategy and no backup.”

“You’re under _quarantine,_ Pidge!” The outburst seems to surprise Keith as much as it does Pidge, and for a long moment, neither of them speaks. Matt drops his gaze to the floor, and Coran’s suddenly intensely interested in a status readout on his console. Behind Pidge, Hunk breathes out a soft, _What?_ Groaning, Keith straightens and drops the hand that’s massaging his forehead. “You remember Coran and Allura’s story. About what happened to Zarkon in the rift.”

“Well… _yeah_ ,” Pidge says. “Except Zarkon and Honerva kinda _died_ , and we kinda definitely did _not._ No death, no undeath, right?”

Matt lifts his head, his eyes wide in a pale face like he wasn’t _already_ thinking about how close Pidge came to dying, and Coran swiftly inserts himself into the conversation. “It’s purely a precaution, and I’m sure neither of you is in any _real_ danger. It’s just that we don’t really know how the rift works, and we don’t want to chance anything going… what do you humans call it? Screwy?”

“It’s just for a day,” Keith says. “You were asleep for about three vargas, so that only leaves another seventeen.”

Seventeen vargas. Pidge does the conversion in her head, then blows out a long breath. Twenty-four hours, give or take. Not a lot of time, except that the energy coursing through her veins doesn’t seem like it is going to slacken any time soon, and until it does, she isn’t getting any sleep. Exhaustion already lurks at the edges of her mind, chipping away at her focus with a headache that just barely edges its way into painful.

“Do you really think we’re gonna go all glowy-eyed and evil?” Hunk asks.

Coran hesitates—just a fraction of a moment, but long enough to cut through Pidge’s irritation. “No,” Coran says. “You’re going to be just fine.”

Pidge catches Hunk’s eye and tries to force a smile. It doesn’t work. “So… what are we supposed to do for the next seventeen vargas?” she asks.

“Try to relax,” Matt says. “You’ve just been through something terrible, and you deserve a chance to rest.”

“Think of it like a vacation!” Coran chimes in. “Read a book, build a robot. It’s probably safest not to actually _leave_ the _Roniro_ , but you can certainly spend some time with your lions if you’d like to. You should be able to connect with them from anywhere on the ship. It’s… not a big ship.”

“We’d noticed,” Pidge says. She reaches out, and sure enough Green is waiting just a thought away. She’s more subdued than Pidge is used to—worried, maybe, or just resting. It would probably do them both some good to talk later. “I’m guessing they’re not in a hangar or anything.”

Matt shakes his head. “Standing guard outside. Pretty sure Yellow’s bigger than this entire ship, so...”

“Right.” Pidge hesitates. “I guess we’ll go try to distract ourselves, then.”

“You do that,” Keith says. “We’ll be there in seventeen vargas to pick you up.” He pauses, catching Pidge’s eye. “You’re going to be okay.”

He almost manages to sound convincing.

* * *

Hunk likes to think he’s a rational person. Anxious, sure. He blows things out of proportion all the time—he knows he does—and he has a tendency to get hung up on hypotheticals. But, like, _realistic_ hypotheticals. Usually. Space Cthulhu is pushing the limits of rationality, maybe, but in his defense, space _is_ full of big, scary, impossible things.

The point is, when things start going spooky, Hunk isn’t the type to jump immediately to ‘ghosts.’ Whatever Lance says, the incident with the corrupted crystal was purely electronic in origin. And, well, maybe a little magical. But not supernatural.

But Hunk really is starting to think the _Roniro_ is haunted.

Something bangs in the air ducts overhead, making Hunk jump. Pidge glances over at him. “Heater probably just kicked in,” she says, aiming for casual and falling about a hundred yards to one side, squarely in ‘freaked as heck’ territory. “The air expands as it heats up, and the resulting increase in pressure causes the duct to warp, which can cause random noises.”

“I know how thermodynamics work.” Hunk is aware that he sounds testy, which isn’t fair to Pidge. It helps to know someone else is as hyper-aware of the ship’s strange noises as he is, and is trying just as hard to rationalize them. Maybe they’re feeding off each other’s paranoia; twice already Hunk felt eyes on the back of his neck, and once when he was curled up on the floor of Pidge’s room-turned-workshop, something touched him.

It was a warm, light touch, almost hesitant, and he hummed to ask Pidge what she needed, only to open his eyes and find her on the opposite side of the room. The touch lingered even as he turned his eyes to the empty space around his feet, only vanishing when he pulled his foot away.

Needless to say, he gave up on sleeping after that.

The knock on the door twenty minutes later makes them both jump and reach automatically for their bayards.

“Pidge?” Matt calls. “Are you… are you in there? Can we talk?”

Hunk takes a deep breath, trying to regain control of his racing heart, and pointedly doesn’t watch Pidge wrestle with herself. She’s scared, and tired, and frustrated (not least of all at Matt himself), and Hunk knows she probably doesn’t want to deal with that mess right now—but they’re family, after all, and Pidge has never been able to stay mad at the people she loves.

She sighs, pushes her laptop away, and goes to answer the door. “What?”

Matt’s reply is soft, and Hunk catches himself straining to hear. Which is bad, and he shouldn’t do that. They deserve a little bit of privacy, especially after the confrontation on the bridge. It’s not like it’s either of their fault—Matt doesn’t want to add more stress to Pidge’s plate after everything she’s been through, but Pidge has a thing about people lying to her after everything that happened with the Kerberos mission.

Hunk should just leave them to sort it out and focus on fixing the jet pack in his armor, which got a little fried from their dip in the rift.

He listens anyway, because he’s bored, and he’s terrified, and listening to Pidge and Matt is better than letting his paranoia have the run of the place.

“I’m sorry,” Matt says. “I know I screwed up, and I should have just told you what was going on from the start. I just—I’m a little freaked out right now. I’m not thinking straight.”

“I’ll say.” Pidge sniffs, her voice more than a little watery. “But come _on_ , Matt. You have to know this is excessive. Quarantine? Nothing happened in there. We’re _fine—_ or we will be, once we’re back on the castle-ship and not being treated like prisoners.”

Matt’s silence speaks volumes, and Hunk risks a glance over his shoulder. Matt’s standing just outside the door, heartbreak written across his face. Poor guy. It’s gotta be hard watching his little sister get dragged into a rift in spacetime itself, never mind fighting with her when she gets back.

“I don’t know what to think,” Matt admits. “We just need to survive a few more vargas, and then everything can go back to normal. Okay?”

Whatever Pidge says in response, Hunk doesn’t hear it. His head suddenly feels like it’s stuffed full of cotton, pressure building in his ears until he can’t hear anything: the conversation at the door, the rush of air through the vents, the click of his tools on armor. His hands still, and he tugs on his ear, trying to ease the pressure.

_"Stop running."_

Hunk jerks upright, spinning around so fast he drops his multitool on the desk. The clatter is almost deafening, but it brings with it the return of Hunk’s senses. He searches the shadows for—something. Anything. The voice he heard— _definitely_ heard this time, clear as day—sounded like a ten-year-old boy whispering in his ear.

From Yellow's frantic roaring in his head, he wasn’t the only one who heard it, either. (He’s not sure whether or not that’s a good thing.)

But the room is empty, and Matt and Pidge don’t seem to have noticed anything. Pidge’s shoulders have lost their rigid set, and she leans forward, burying her face in Matt’s chest and muttering something that doesn’t reach Hunk’s ears.

“I know,” Matt says, squeezing her around the shoulders. “It’ll be over soon.”

Hunk’s heart is still pounding by the time Matt leaves them to their projects. Pidge trudges back to her desk and pulls her computer closer. Hunk watches for a few seconds, fiddling with his jet pack, and waits until he can speak without his voice wobbling. This wasn’t the first time the voice returned. He’s heard it more times than he can count by now, usually a wordless murmur just on the edge of hearing. Twice, though, he swears he heard it say, _Get out._

“Have you picked up any transmissions yet?”

Pidge checks one of the four screens staring back at her from the wall, then shakes her head. “Nothing. This region is too remote for us to accidentally intercept someone else’s transmissions, and the others haven’t gotten in touch since Keith.” She pauses. “Why?”

Hunk hesitates. Mostly of the time, the voices just tickle his ear like so much static, with the occasional blip of an alien language too indistinct for the translator to unravel. After the initial panic faded, Hunk started to wonder if the voices were some weird feedback, or crossed wires in the PA projecting snippets of deep-space transmissions. It was easy enough to convince Pidge to hack the ship’s comms array. She doesn’t trust Matt or Coran to tell her what’s going on, which is… weird. Hunk hasn’t ever seen Pidge and Matt fight, but there’s definite tension there, even after their conversation. She’s not mad at him—not _as_ mad—but she also hasn’t given up on listening to his phone calls.

Not that Pidge’s suspicion is totally unfounded. When she asked what happened with the rift—whether the others destroyed it, or if Lotor got there first—Matt and Coran tried their hardest to dodge the question. When Pidge persisted, all they said was that the rift is still open, but not to worry about it.

“Hunk...” Pidge says slowly, spinning in her desk chair to face him. “Why _are_ you so worried about transmissions?”

“Uh… no reason.”

Pidge silently raises an eyebrow, which makes Hunk flush. “I’m not gonna judge, Hunk. I’m sitting here half convinced there’s an invisible monster watching us, so whatever you say’s gotta be less crazy than that.” She tilts her head to the side. “Or at the very least, we’re crazy together.”

 _Crazy, huh?_ Hunk drops his head into his hands, smiling to himself. _That sounds about right. What do you think, boy?_

For a moment, when Hunk turns his attention to the bond, he finds… nothing. It’s as though he stepped out into open air and is hanging there like a cartoon waiting to fall.

Yellow roars into the bond, catching him before his world crumbles. This isn’t the first time this has happened, and as each time before, Yellow is quick to reassure Hunk. The lion can’t hide his sorrow and guilt, but Hunk is having difficulty making sense of the emotions. He initially assumed something happened to their bond in the rift—a temporary short-circuit of some sort. But what if the problem is on Yellow’s end? What would that mean? Can Yellow sense an impending transformation? Is Hunk going to end up just like Zarkon and Honerva?

Stomach churning, Hunk curls in on himself and tries to breathe through the twist of anxiety as Yellow croons in his head. “Do you… Do you think maybe…” Hunk trails off. He can’t think of a way to say this that doesn’t make him sound ridiculous.

Pidge doesn’t say anything, though, just watches him. It isn’t the oily, menacing attention of the invisible presence; it’s more sympathetic than that. She really does get where he’s coming from. A few white strands of hair fall across his eyes, an unpleasant reminder of the change. He can almost imagine Pidge’s new blonde look is down to weird lighting, but this...

“The rift really did a number on us, didn't it?”

Pidge laughs once. “That’s the understatement of the millennium.”

“You think that’s all this is?” Hunk lowers his hands, searching Pidge’s face for… What? Reassurance? If so, he isn’t going to find it. “You think we’re still just keyed up from all that Quintessence and everything? Like a really bad adrenaline rush?”

Shrugging, Pidge pulls her feet up onto her chair and rests her cheek on her knees. Her head is turned away from Hunk in that position, staring at the screens on the wall—one for the comms network, one for the _Roniro’s_ status readouts, and two for whatever personal projects Pidge is using to keep herself busy.

“I don’t know,” she finally says, her voice almost too low to hear. “It’s either that or something followed us out.”

The words chill Hunk to the bone, though he’s been trying (and failing) to suppress similar thoughts for the last three vargas. (Just fourteen to go. He keeps telling himself that, and every time it seems the finish line has drifted further out of reach.)

The back of his neck crawls, and he turns. There’s nothing there, of course. Just the far wall of Pidge’s bedroom and the dark shadows under her bed. No eldritch abominations, no six-dimensional space bugs, no shadowy Ringwraiths waiting to shank him when his guard is down.

 _Fourteen vargas,_ he thinks, forcing his eyes back onto his jet pack and steadfastly ignoring the shivers racing down his spine and the churning in his gut. _Almost halfway there._

Almost.


	3. Living Shadows

Green is scared.

Pidge knows very little about whatever the fuck is happening to her, but she knows that the mind on the other end of the bond is restless and frightened, and Pidge has never known Green to be either. That, more than anything, convinces her that the… _thing…_ watching her is real. Green senses it, too. Each time it shows up, she roars a warning that floods Pidge’s system with adrenaline.

It’s here now, unseen eyes prickling along her scalp, but Pidge is frozen at her desk, hands gripping the smooth polymer surface. She wants to look, wants to see the whatever-it-is or reassure herself that she’s still alone—just her at the table and Hunk asleep on the bed—but she _can’t_. There’s nothing behind her. Nothing visible. But seeing that won’t make the eyes or the terror go away. Not for the first time, she’s grateful beyond words that Matt and Coran let them take their armor and bayards back; she needs that security right now, even if the watcher isn’t something she can fight.

_Bom._

The ship shakes, screens over Pidge’s desk flickering as Green’s panic rears higher. For a second, Pidge thinks the watcher is there, trying to claw its way in. It’s coming for her.

_Bom._

No. That’s not the watcher, that’s… that’s _Green._ She’s ramming the ship; Pidge can see it if she focuses. Thrashing, roaring, slamming her head against the hull of the _Roniro._ Both of them are scared, and that’s enough to send Green into a panic.

The ship shakes again, metal shrieking on metal. Pidge’s hair stands on end, and the image of sudden decompression, of frigid temperatures, suffocation, death, pours into the cracks left by her terror.

 _Stop!_ she cries to Green, grabbing her chair as the next impact threatens to toss her to the ground. _Green, stop it!_

 _**Danger,** _ Green says. _**Danger within. It will not take you from me.** _

_Yeah, and if you come tearing in here, we’re **all** dead. _

The shudders subside. Pidge’s heart still pounds, but she can’t feel the invisible watcher anymore. Maybe Green’s assault scared it away, or maybe the very real danger of a panicked lion gave her Quintessence-baked brain enough to worry about that it didn’t feel the need to invent more threats. Either way, she’s not complaining.

On the bed behind her, Hunk sleeps on. How he can sleep through that—how he can sleep at all—is a mystery. Pidge can’t help being a little jealous. Sleep sounds _fantastic_ right now, and not only as a way to pass the thirteen vargas left in their quarantine. She’s _exhausted,_ physically, mentally, and emotionally, but even if she found a way to quiet the fear, there’s still that raging storm of energy inside her. (The Quintessence. The Quintessence that seeped into her through the hole in her glove. It has to be the Quintessence, this storm lighting up every nerve with more energy than her body is meant to hold.)

It’s torture. For once, she actually wants to sleep. She made the dumb-ass decision to skimp on sleep last night as she prepared scanners for the next time a rift opened up, never expecting one to appear the very next day. The result? In the last forty-eight hours, she’s had maybe five hours of sleep.

Concern and contrition purr in Pidge’s chest, bringing tears to her eyes. Suddenly all she wants is to curl up in Green’s cockpit, where all is dark and calm and inter-dimensional beings of questionable substance can’t reach her. But she _can’t_ , and she probably won’t be able to until this quarantine ends. For all Keith made it sound like a suggestion, she knows her brother well enough to guess how strictly he’ll enforce it.

 _**Apologies,** _ Green says.

“It’s not your fault,” Pidge murmurs. “It just sucks not being able to do anything.”

Hunk’s breathing hitches as he startles awake, and Pidge hastily wipes her eyes. Hunk is having a hard enough time dealing with his own issues; he doesn’t need Pidge giving him _more_ to worry about.

A moment of silence. Then Hunk screams.

Pidge is on her feet in an instant, bayard in hand. Hunk shed his armor when he decided to try for sleep, but Pidge is still too wired to let her guard down. Too ready for fears and phantoms to become a fight—and a good thing, too. She’s never been so happy to be so paranoid.

Something leans over Hunk. A shadow. At a stretch, she might call it humanoid, but it’s too indistinct for that. It’s just a haze. A dark blur. A figure with eyes glowing gold, violet flecks like ashes drifting slowly up, up…

The figure reaches a hand out toward Hunk, who has gone still on the bed, one leg pulled up like he wants to run, to fling himself past the creature. But his eyes are wide, his hands clutch at the neck of his undersuit, and he’s _not moving._

“Hunk!” Pidge screams, already charging. The storm in her soul works to her advantage now, pushing her to act before her mind has even fully grasped the danger. She blinks against the neon glow of her bayard as she swings.

The creature vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

Pidge locks eyes with Hunk, who’s still pale, still frozen on the bed, though she can see now the way he’s shaking, his whole body rattling like a shoddy robot on the verge of collapse. She should go to him. When she woke up terrified and out of her senses with all the what-ifs, he was there for her with a hug and solemn reassurances that, tenuous or not, at least reminded her that she wasn’t alone in this.

She should do the same for him.

Before she can work up the courage—let alone figure out _how_ to comfort someone when every rational bone in her body is screaming _danger_ like a goddamn robot out of shitty twentieth century sci-fi—the lights flicker. Hunk tenses, but Pidge is already spinning, staring in horror at the vent—the same vent she escaped through when the eyes watching her from the corners of this very room pushed her over the edge—as something begins tapping on the metal. It’s a hollow sound, and so soft she might not have heard it if not for the petrified silence that fell in the wake of the shadowy visitor.

“Pidge.”

Hunk’s voice is a death rattle, frail and rasping like old lace that disintegrates as it touches Pidge’s skin. She shudders, backing toward the bed as the eyes return, twin pinpricks of gold watching her from the vent. The temperature in the room drops until Pidge’s teeth start to chatter and frost blossoms on the wall beneath the vent, spreading outward in fractal patterns.

The lights flicker once more, and the room plunges into darkness. She can’t see anything, can’t hear anything but her racing heartbeat and her stuttering breaths and the incessant _tap, tap, tap_ in the vents. Yellow eyes bore into her.

They blink, and there’s nothing but the darkness. The darkness and the shadow-thing, slipping unseen down the wall, across the floor. It makes no noise, but she can feel it; the currents in the frigid air, the prickle of Quintessence beneath her skin.

It’s coming for her.

“ _No more running,_ ” the creature whispers. “ _Your lives are forfeit. I claim them._ ”

Yellow eyes open inches from her own, blazing bright. Pidge realizes with a start that these aren’t eyes at all. They’re windows. Miniature rifts. Holes poked in the very fabric of reality. She sees the void contained within, shifting currents of Quintessence and flocks of dark spores that drift on imagined winds.

The creature smiles, and the rifts where its eyes should be crinkle in amusement.

“ _It will be easier for you if you do not fight._ ”

“Pidge!” Hunk yells, shattering the spell the creature has cast on her. His bayard lights up the room with a blinding flash, and she sees him, kneeling on the floor by the desk, where he’d left his armor and bayard. It falls into his hand, and the light dims, and the glowing eyes capture her again, drawing her in like gravity, like magnetism, and in the darkness she can find no purchase to drag herself back from the precipice.

Hunk opens fire, the rapid flashes stabbing at Pidge’s head until it feels about to split. She staggers back, screaming in agony. The creature hisses. She can see it, between flashes. Eyes burning gold with rage in the dark beats between lasers; pulses of dark embers untouched by the weapon’s glow when the rest of the room is washed in light.

She reaches for her bayard, but Green presses into their bond, all taut vines and urgency, roots clawing at Pidge to hold her in place as she tries to join the fray.

 _**Wait,** _ the lion says. _**Your weapons cannot hurt it.** _

Something about that plucks at Pidge. Curiosity and suspicion she can’t force into any semblance of order with the adrenaline coursing through her. Thankfully, Green doesn’t try to explain; all she does is form an image in Pidge’s head. It’s her bayard, but different _._ Not a katar, but a cannon, smaller than Hunk’s by far. It doesn’t seem to have enough substance to it to pack a punch, but Green is insistent.

Clinging to the image, Pidge activates her bayard. The cannon materializes in her hand, and it’s lighter than she expected. The grip wraps around her fist, the barrel protruding beyond her knuckles like a very oddly-shaped boxing glove. Currents run through her body, passing freely between her and the bayard—Quintessence, she realizes. The hum of it is so familiar by now it’s almost background noise, and she powers up the cannon without meaning to.

She intuits the inner workings of the weapon as it charges, and it brings to mind echos of Green’s vine cannon. There are questions there, questions that desperately need to be asked, but--

 _**No time,** _ Green says. _**Use it. Distract the Hunter.** _

The Hunter. It’s oddly fitting, for something so unnatural. But—no—she can’t get distracted now. Hunk’s barrages haven’t slowed, but the creature seems unaffected by them. It turns, stalking toward him at a steady pace. Maybe the lasers slow it—maybe—but no more than that.

Pidge fires. The recoil sends her lurching backward, and the edge of her desk digs into her spine, driving the breath from her lungs. She watches, dazed, as a pocket of light slams into the Hunter. It stops, seemingly confused, and those eerie eyes look down at the miniature sun buried in the center of its mass.

Hunk’s assault slackens, his confusion palpable in the dark room. Shifting shadows on the wall give the tableau a surreal air—a scene painted in gold and violet, where Hunk and Pidge seem starkly out of place, too tangible to be real.

The Hunter’s figure blurs, deep shadows wrapping around the glowing sun. It brings to mind a swarm of bats, a vampire feeding on its victim, and Pidge doesn’t need Green’s prompting to leap on the opportunity. She charges, bayard reverting to a more familiar form. The green is jarring against the tones of the rift, and it’s almost a relief when the light plunges into darkness as she thrusts deep into the bulk of the Hunter’s mass.

It shudders, golden light leaking out as its form thins, stretches, and writhes. Black smoke crawls up Pidge’s arm like blood running the wrong way. Her skin itches beneath her armor, a cry catching in her throat.

Then, abruptly, the creature and the golden ball of light vanish. There’s no corpse, no ashes, no residue left on the floor or on Pidge’s arm.

Just darkness.

A moment later, the lights come back on—an instant before the door hisses open and Pidge’s friends come tumbling into the room. She sees the colors of their armor first—red, black, and blue, but something about that feels wrong. It’s not… it shouldn’t be…

“Pidge!” Keith cries. (He looks severe in his black armor, and far, _far_ too somber.) “Hunk! Are you okay? What happened?”

(Allura is next, ethereal and pressing and wrong, wrong _wrong_ in blue.) “We heard shouting and thought…” She stops, staring into Pidge’s eyes like she expects to find the rift there.

“Green’s having a fit. I thought—I didn’t know what to do except call the others. Are—are you okay, Pidge?” (Matt. Matt in red. Matt’s wearing paladin armor, wearing Keith’s armor, wearing the wrong armor. They’re all wearing the wrong armor, but if Keith’s in black and Allura’s in blue and Matt— _Matt—_ is in red, then--)

“Where’s Lance?”

It’s Hunk who speaks, giving voice to the whirlwind in Pidge that whips her mind from the glimpse they caught of Lance in the rift to the snatches she’d caught of the conversation on the bridge. _Do they know?_

It makes no sense. Lance is—even if Lance is-- (But he can’t be. He _can’t_.) But if he is, how could the others have moved on so quickly? Even when Shiro was missing, there was never so much as a suggestion that Keith might take his place, wear his armor, _become_ the black paladin. For Allura to wear _Lance’s_ armor now means…

Pidge’s breath hitches, and she flings herself at another question, anything to distract herself, but where she lands is hardly a comfort. “Where’s _Shiro?_ ”

She can’t look at Matt—Hunk’s question splattered pain across his face like blood, splotchy red cheeks and wide eyes and pinched brow that warn of fracturing composure—but her own words seem to gut Keith, who buckles. He doesn’t fall, but it seems a miracle that he doesn’t. His shoulders cave in like some horrible creature ripped the heart from his chest and he’s trying to fill the empty space it left behind.

Pidge turns to Allura, the only one of them clinging to any semblance of composure, and even there she finds pain so stark it feels like an attack.

It’s too much. The terror of the Hunter, the adrenaline of the battle, the pain she can sense waiting here, ready to pounce. “What happened?” Her voice snaps at the air, angrier than she has any right to be, but she clings to it. She _needs_ the anger. She needs the strength it gives her, because right now all she _wants_ is to throw the blankets over her head and wait for this nightmare to end.

Allura looks to Keith, and Keith’s eyes dart to Matt, and Matt just stares at the floor, none of them—not _one_ of them—looking Pidge or Hunk in the eye. If Shiro were here, he’d already be explaining the situation to them; he probably wouldn’t have hidden it from them to begin with, but he certainly wouldn’t ignore a direct question like this. If Lance were here, he’d be just as much of a pushover.

But neither of them are here, and their absence pulses beneath Pidge’s skin like a second heartbeat.

She rounds on Keith.

“Where are they? What aren’t you telling us?”

His eyes meet hers for a fraction of a second before turning aside. Keith dismisses his bayard and turns as if to leave. “That doesn’t matter now. We need to go. Lotor saw through our distraction. He’s on his way.”

The thought should bring fear with it, but Pidge has been scared shitless all day. There’s no room left in her for more fear, so while Hunk moans in fright behind her, Pidge just stalks forward and seizes Keith by the elbow.

“What. Happened?”

He stops, his back to her. “Don’t ask me that, Pidge. You don’t want to know the answer.”

“Like hell I don’t! You guys have been lying to us since we came out of the rift, and I’m sick of it! What happened to Lance and Shiro? Why aren’t they here? What the fuck aren’t you telling us?”

“They’re _dead_ , Pidge!” Keith rounds on her, his face a storm. “Haggar _did_ something to Shiro while you guys were out on that last mission, and he turned on you, and he _killed_ you! Lance isn’t here because he’s _dead!_ _Shiro_ killed him.”

“What?” The word falls from numb lips as Pidge stumbles back. Keith’s story refuses to parse for her. It doesn’t make sense—can’t make sense. Pidge searches back through her memory, trying to fit it in—a mission, and Haggar, Shiro turning on them, _dying_. But it _doesn’t_ fit. She didn’t go on a mission with Shiro and Lance. They’re both facing Lotor, or they were when Hunk and Pidge got dragged into the rift.

Her head is still spinning as Matt puts his hand on Keith’s shoulder to calm him and Allura steps forward, reaching toward Pidge as though calming a wild klanmüirl. “You died,” she says. “Both of you, along with Lance. Matt and Coran cast your bodies into the rift. It… it was the only thing we could think of. The universe _needs_ Voltron.”

“And the universe gave you back,” Matt says. There’s a raw note to his voice, the same rawness she heard from him on the bridge, though she didn’t recognize it at the time. She thought he was just shaken from the close call, not that he was _mourning_ her. “We don’t know why Lance didn’t come back with you. Maybe… maybe because Blue accepted Allura. We don’t have anyone else who can fly Yellow or Green.”

 _Or maybe because_ our _Lance was never in the rift for you to steal._

It’s only once the thought is in her head, fully formed, that she understands what must have happened. Alternate realities. They never made it home from the rift. Her brother— _her_ Matt, the one who must have heard her scream as she disappeared—probably thinks she’s dead. _Her_ friends are mourning her and Hunk even now while this version of them stole her and Hunk away.

They didn’t mean to, she thinks, but they did.

And she doesn’t want to be here. She doesn’t want to be stuck in a reality where Lance is dead—dead at _Shiro’s hand_. Where the team is splintered and broken and the Hunter is breathing down her neck day and night and sleep is more elusive than it ever has been before. This is _not_ her home, and all she wants is to get back to her family.

A glance over her shoulder shows Hunk—stunned, slack-jawed, but eyes burning with understanding. Their gazes lock, and she knows: he’s figured it out, too. He doesn’t say anything, though, for which Pidge is grateful. There’s something harsh and distrusting about this version of her friends. Watching half your team die at the hands of your leader would do that to you. But it prickles at her—not knowing how her friends will react. If she and Hunk try to go home, will the others stop them? Will it come to a fight?

Best not to find out.

“Okay,” Keith says testily. “Secret’s out. Can we _go_ now?”

For now, Pidge thinks, it probably best to play along.

* * *

“We need to get back to the rift.”

Pidge’s words don’t surprise Hunk. If anything, he’s impressed she managed to hold out this long before saying something. They’re back on the castle-ship now, but something about it feels off. Maybe the fact that Lance and Shiro aren’t here, and the hole they left behind has taken on a life of its own. Maybe that Hunk is still looking out for the shadow-creature. It hasn’t made a reappearance since Pidge blasted it with her weird energy cannon, but that doesn’t mean it’s not just biding its time.

Maybe the castle feels strange for the simple fact that Hunk now knows it’s not _his_ castle.

“Okay, I’m not arguing with you,” Hunk says, holding up his hands. “But, uh, you _do_ realize that the rift almost killed us the first time around, right? And we only managed to find our way into _this_ reality by luck. How are we supposed to get back to the reality we started in?”

“Trial and error,” Pidge says stubbornly. “I’m not giving up until I get back to my brother.”

“And to Lance.” Hunk pulls his feet up onto his bed—not the most comfortable way to sit in full paladin armor, but neither he nor Pidge are ready to ditch it so soon after the encounter with the shadow creature. The others are content to leave Pidge and Hunk to “rest” while they deal with Lotor. Technically, there are still ten and a half vargas left on their quarantine, and Hunk has a sneaking suspicion they’ll find much of the castle locked to them if they try to go exploring now. They weren’t even allowed to pilot their own lions back to the castle; Keith and Allura used their lions to nudge the _Roniro_ into the castle’s main hangar, and Green and Yellow returned to their own hangars automatically. Apparently they’ve become more independent since this reality’s Pidge and Hunk died, even going to far as to fly themselves to the rift to watch Hunk and Pidge come out.

Hunk can’t help wondering whether Yellow has known all along that he’s the wrong Hunk. Is that why he’s been so sad?

A distant rumble is his only answer, and it’s like the lion’s intent is wrapped in gauze. He can hear it, and he can sense Yellow’s sorrow and sympathy, but the fine details are lost. There’s always been a level of nuance to their bond—a sense that they don’t _need_ words to communicate because they’re so in sync.

That nuance is gone now, and Hunk can’t keep pretending that it’s distance or fatigue or the whispers in his ear telling him to surrender himself. (They vanished for a time, those whispers, but he thinks he can still hear them in the shush of air through the vents, creeping closer all the time.)

“Okay,” Hunk says slowly, rubbing his ear to drown out the voice. “So what do we do? You think they’ll just let us go?”

“I’m not counting on it,” Pidge says. “After everything they went through to get us back? Well, supposedly ‘back.’” She shakes her head. “We’ll have to do it quietly. Have you ever tried overriding the castle’s locks?”

“What, you can’t hack them?”

She shrugs. “I could probably figure it out, but usually when I want to get somewhere I shouldn’t be, I go through the vents. I just figured, why waste the time if you’ve already got us covered? So…”

Hunk taps his index fingers together, looking anywhere but at Pidge. “I… may have done some poking around inside the door controls. They keep the engine room and all the other maintenance areas locked,” he adds quickly, before Pidge can comment on his ill-gotten goody-two-shoes reputation. “I was curious!”

Pidge smiles, but it’s short-lived. “Okay, if you can get us to Green, I think I can use her systems to trick the castle into thinking I’m Allura and opening a wormhole back to the rift.”

“You can do that?”

Pidge flushes. “I mean. It’s not _ideal_. I can fudge the Quintessence signature on the power supply to get past the security features, but that means I’ll be drawing a lot of power from the ship’s crystal. They’ll know what happened as soon as we open the wormhole. But… it’ll work.”

Hunk arches an eyebrow at her. “How long have you been planning this?”

“Since I thought I might have to ditch you guys to find my family?” She clears her throat, snatching her computer off her desk. It’s strange—it looks just like the computer Hunk is used to. Maybe a little more dinged up, but maybe he just never stopped to notice all the scuffs before. He wonders whether it holds all the same files, or if this Pidge was working on different projects.

It feels disrespectful to be going through a dead girl’s computer, even if it does technically belong to Pidge.

“Anyway,” Pidge says. “Give me a second to see what I have to work with on this side and then we can--”

A knock on the door silences them. Hunk stares at Pidge, guilt rising. He knows there’s no way any of the others could know what they were just planning—not unless they really are being watched this time—but he can’t help it. Sneaking around behind his friends’ backs, planning to run off and leave them to their fate… It feels like a betrayal, for all it’s necessary to get back to their _other_ friends in the world they came from.

Pidge recovers more quickly than Hunk and hurries to the door, opening it to reveal Matt. He seems more haggard than Hunk remembers him being, tired and aching with bags under his eyes and a nervous flutter in his fingers as he stares at Pidge. This is a Matt who watched his sister die at the hands of the other most important person in his life.

“Hey,” he says, wrapping his arms around himself. “I wanted to see how you were holding up after...”

“After I found out that I _died_?” Pidge asks. There’s no anger in her voice, but there’s no warmth either. She looks at Matt the way she looks at Kolivan or any other Blade: as an ally, and nothing more. “Yeah. That was a little bit of a shock.”

Matt flinches at that. “I didn’t want you to find out like that.”

“You didn’t want us to find out at all.”

Matt doesn’t argue. “It’s over now, though. You’re back, and you’re going to be okay, so we can just put all that behind us.”

“Unless I turn evil like Zarkon,” Pidge says. “There _is_ still half a day left in our quarantine.” Her voice is cutting, teeming with bitterness Hunk has rarely heard from her. She’s sarcastic and occasionally acerbic, and she doesn’t always realize the sting behind her words, but this is something different. This is Pidge _trying_ to get under Matt’s skin.

This is Pidge hurting.

Hunk only realizes it when she lifts her eyes to meet Matt’s. Both gazes glisten with unshed tears, and Hunk suddenly sees what it is Pidge sees here. Not a world where she has and a world where she’s lost, but two worlds with a brother who just wants her safe. If Lance were here, still raw over his Hunk’s death, would Hunk be able to walk away and leave him to mourn a second time?

Pidge turns her back to the door, focusing on her computer screen and deliberately shutting Matt out. Longing paints the curve of her back, but she clenches her jaw against the tug of family. She doesn’t see the way Matt’s face blanches, how he shrinks. He doesn’t fill the red armor the way Keith does—that’s not a physical comparison; the two are actually quite similar in size. But Keith lends a _presence_ to the station of red paladin that Matt can’t match. His past hollows him out, and even despite the steel he found with the rebels, he seems frail now. He’s lost everything, defied reality itself to bring his sister back, and now she hates him for it.

Sympathy pangs reverberate through Hunk’s body as he watches the scene. There’s no easy answer here. He knows there isn’t. But he can’t help wishing for a way to make everyone happy.

“Pidge...” Matt begins.

A siren splits the silence, and all three of them tense.

“Paladins!” Coran cries. “There’s an intruder on the castle! Everyone on your guard!”

Hunk’s mind flashes at once to the shadow-thing that came for him on the _Roniro_. But Matt is already swearing, bayard springing to his hand. It takes the shape of a staff that glows on either end. “Stay close,” he says. “We need to regroup with the others.”

Pidge grabs Hunk’s arm as he starts after Matt, waiting until he’s out of sight around the next corner before she whispers, “Now’s our chance.”

Hunk feels cold. “What— _leave? Now?_ ” His stomach knots at the thought of running while the rest of the team face down a threat on board the castle-ship itself. This may not be his reality, but they _are_ his friends. “They need our help!”

He starts to push past her, but her hold on him tightens. “And they won’t need our help for the rest of the war? We’re always in danger, Hunk, whichever reality we’re in. All you’d accomplish by staying here is putting _our_ team in more danger than they need to be in.” A tug on Hunk’s arm turns him around, and for just a moment he’s looking at a stranger—a stranger with a golden glint in her eyes.

He blinks, and Pidge is Pidge once more, small and tired and pleading.

“We can only be in one reality, Hunk. I’m going home, and I’m going _now._ The only question is if you’re coming with me.”

Before Hunk can respond, there’s a shout up ahead, and Matt skids into view, flat on his back and curled around his right arm. His bayard, inactive, spins in place some feet away. Pidge freezes. Despite all her arguments and all her logic, it’s still her brother lying wounded on the floor, and Hunk can see her warring with her need to go to him.

Shiro steps into view around the corner, only it’s not Shiro. Not as Hunk knows him. He wears the armor of Lotor’s generals, the blue sigil splashed across his chest. His hair is longer than the Shiro Hunk knows, pulled back in a tail except for a few white strands that fall across his face. His eyes glow yellow—Galra yellow, yes, but something in his expression when he looks at Hunk brings to mind the shadow-creature. Hunk can see it there if he squints, mimicking Shiro’s every move.

“I thought I killed you,” Shiro says, head turned toward Hunk as he stalks up the corridor. “ _Tch._ You always were tougher than we gave you credit for. And you.” His eyes flick toward Pidge. “I shouldn’t be surprised you found a way to cheat death. Oh, well. More fun for me, I guess.”

He glances down as Matt tries to stand, his arms shaking as he pushes himself up. Cruel amusement lights Shiro’s face. The sight makes Hunk’s heart flutter feebly, his pulse whispering, _This is wrong,_ with every heartbeat. Shiro goes down on one knee, wearing a crooked smile as Matt lifts his head to glare at him.

“Still fighting, Mattie?” Shiro asks. “Come on. I’m sure Hunk and Pidgeon can keep me entertained for a little while.”

Matt spits blood in Shiro’s face. “You’re not taking her again, you son of a bitch.”

Unperturbed, Shiro wipes the spit and blood from his face, stares at his hand for a long moment, and reaches out to wrap his right hand around Matt’s neck. A shadow burns violet in the heart of the magenta glow, and Hunk is back in that dark room aboard the _Roniro_ , frozen in terror as the dark figure reaches for him.

Matt’s cry of pain is weak, but it cuts Hunk to the core, and in an instant he’s made his decision. Pidge swears as he summons his bayard and opens fire, his lasers bursting apart on Shiro’s armor. Hunk feels sick, shooting at one of his best friends, but he keeps it up, shooting again and again until Shiro drops Matt, draws a pistol from a holster on his thigh, and returns fire.

With a yelp, Hunk pulls Pidge behind him, trades his bayard for his shield, and begins backing down the hallway, away from Shiro.

There’s something viscerally _wrong_ about Shiro wielding a gun. He’s a close-range fighter, his body as much a shield as a weapon, and though he’s not afraid to use lethal force, he's too aware of his capacity for destruction to relish the violence. He fights like… well, like someone who spent a year in the Arena, clawing at survival with every desperate strike.

That is not who Hunk sees before him. This Shiro is a soldier: cold, emotionless, in control. He shoots to kill, and Hunk doesn’t have to feign panic as he hurries Pidge along. He meant to draw Shiro away from Matt, but he’s already beginning to second-guess this plan. He can’t die here.

Three shots in quick succession hit the exact same spot on Hunk’s shield, and the energy barrier shatters, shards of light leaving faint scorch marks on his armor. He looks past the shield’s empty, flickering frame, and finds Shiro grinning as he takes aim.

“Hunk!” Pidge cries. “Get down!”

Hunk drops without question, though his knees protest as he hits the ground. His hair stands on end as a concentrated ball of energy sails overhead, the intense golden light casting shadows on the wall. In the instant before the light hits Shiro in the chest, Hunk swears he sees two shadows stretching out behind Shiro, one pierced through by glowing spots where the eyes should be.

Then Shiro goes down with a scream that tears at Hunk. Pidge is yelling at him, and though he can’t make out the words, the intent is clear: _run_.

They’re halfway to the Green Lion’s hangar before Hunk realizes that Pidge is crying, great heaving gasps that stutter as she runs.

“You did the right thing,” he says when they run up against a locked door. Hunk has the cover off the control panel before Pidge can tell him to unlock it. “You only did what you had to--”

“Don’t.” Pidge stands stiff as a sentry, her back to him, bayard out and ready to fire at the next person to come around the corner. “Don’t try to pretend this is okay. It’s not. None of this is okay.”

Hunk bites his lip, stripping two wires and touching them together. “No,” he says as the door slides open. “It sucks balls. But it’s not your fault.”

“I never said it was.” Pidge is off before Hunk can call her bluff, but that’s probably for the best. He can hear Shiro drawing near, his footsteps ringing loud and unhurried. Hunk wonders if Shiro knows Hunk and Pidge have been cut off from their escape, knows he can take his time backing them into a corner. Or maybe he’s just savoring the hunt.

Two more locked doors bar their way, the last being the door to Green’s hangar, and Hunk takes care of them as quickly as he can. His heartbeat is a wild, erratic thing, his hands unsteady with nervous jitters. One mistake could cost him his life, but the pressure just makes everything worse. He tries not to think about Shiro or the shadow creature, and he only partially succeeds.

Then, mercifully, they make it into the hangar. It’s only then that Hunk realizes that Yellow won’t be there, that they’ll have to both go in Green. It’s probably safer; they won’t have to hold the wormhole open long enough for them both to get through, and with Shiro terrorizing the castle, that might make all the difference. Besides, it’s not like they’ll be able to take the lions into the rift, however much Hunk wants to. The opening isn’t big enough—or it wasn’t back in his own reality; he doesn’t actually know what the rift looks like over here.

Anyway, it’s probably not a good idea to bring a duplicate of the universe’s greatest weapon into their reality. Hunk doesn’t particularly want to top off this adventure by finding out how the universe reacts to a lion-sized paradox.

_**BOOM** _

Hunk jumps as the sound rolls through the hangar. He’s at the foot of Green’s ramp, but he spins back toward the door they came through. He hadn’t actually disabled any of the locks the others had put in place, just forced the door open for a few seconds. It’s locked now, but as a second **_boom_ ** shatters the silence, the metal bows inward, warping so far Hunk spots a magenta glow through a gap an inch wide. Dark, restless motes drift through the opening, pooling on the floor like beads in a lava lamp. They amass there for a second, and then something that looks like a hand made out of pure darkness stretches toward the Green Lion.

“ _Hunk!_ ” Pidge cries. “We need to go!”

Hunk doesn’t waste any more time. He turns, shivering as Shiro’s roar of fury, layered over with something that fuzzes around the edges, chases after him. Green’s paws leave the floor before Hunk has even gained the cockpit, and he sends a silent apology toward Yellow, who responds with a quiet purr. _Go,_ he seems to be saying. _Your friends are waiting._

Pidge is flying one-handed when Hunk joins her, her other hand and most of her focus on a screen hovering beside her. She keys in one final command and hits Return, lips caught between her teeth.

“Come on, _come on..._ ”

A wormhole blossoms before them, and Pidge whoops in delight. Her triumph is short-lived, however, as Matt comes on the radio, breathless with panic. “Pidge? Pidge, what are you doing?”

Pidge closes her eyes, briefly, before reaching for the button that will mute the comms.

“Wait.” Hunk places his hand atop hers. “They deserve an explanation, at least.”

She looks up at him, brow furrowed. She looks at the wormhole. Then she sighs. “I’m sorry, Matt. You… You didn’t bring her back.”

For a weightless moment, Matt doesn’t answer. Finally, he hisses an exhale. “No. No, I _did_. I saved you. I _brought you back, Katie._ ”

A tear forces its way past Pidge’s composure, sliding easily down the tracks left by tears that have only just dried. “No, Matt. I’m not her. I’m not your sister. Hunk and I—we came from another reality. I don’t know if it was just a coincidence that we ended up here or if something you did drew us in, but… We don’t belong here.”

“You’re not making sense,” Keith says. His voice is raw, edging on brokenness Hunk has only ever heard from him on the day Shiro disappeared from the Black Lion. “Just—just come back. We’ll sort this out.” Pidge edges them toward the wormhole, and Keith’s voice grows hard. “Pidge! Turn around, now. That’s an order. Coran—close that wormhole. Don’t let them get away!”

“I can’t--” Coran breaks off, cursing softly—and not anything as mild as _quiznak_. “Shiro’s ship has disengaged. Pidge, Hunk, he’s coming for you!”

“Inside!” Keith barks. “ _Now!_ ”

“No!” Pidge slams her thrusters to full, and Hunk has to grab the back of her seat to stay upright. The pale blue glow of the wormhole fills the viewscreen as Allura calls out a warning.

Matt is louder, his voice breaking as he screams Pidge’s name. “Stop! Katie, _please!_ I can’t—I can’t lose you again! Not you, too! Damn it, Katie! First Dad, then Shiro— _please!_ You’re all I have left!”

Pidge shudders, her breath little more than a hiccup. She doesn’t let up, though, and they plunge into the wormhole. Matt’s voice cuts off mid-sentence. Without him, without Keith raging and Coran crying warnings and Allura trying to appeal to reason, the cockpit feels impossibly silent.

Pidge gasps, letting go of the controls like they’ve suddenly grown barbs, and lets Green guide herself through the wormhole. She curls in on herself, shuddering, and Hunk wraps his arms around the chair and around her shoulders, trying to lend some measure of comfort. Matt’s pleas still echo in his ears, and Hunk is all too aware that his own cheeks are streaked with tears. He knows that however much he’s hurting, Pidge must be feeling it double.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m sorry, Pidge.”

The light around them fades as they emerge on the other side of the wormhole, the familiar moon with its familiar rift spinning slowly below them. Pidge draws in one ragged breath, then another, then wiggles out of Hunk’s hold and takes up the controls again. She sounds like she’s holding herself together with Scotch tape and shoestrings, but she _holds_ , and if the flight down to the rift is shaky, Hunk isn’t about to criticize.

“Almost home,” he whispers, as much for himself as for Pidge. He can’t feel Yellow any longer, but he can hear a growl building in Green’s engines.

They land, and Pidge lays a hand on Green’s console, the golden light of the rift casting her in harsh shadows. Her tears stand out like quicksilver, and her hair gleams metallic in the light. “You’ll have to collapse it after us, girl, if you think you can. We can’t let them try to pull us through again.”

Whatever answer Green gives, it rocks Pidge. She sways on the spot, then nods, pats the console twice, and turns to Hunk.

“Let’s go.”

They seal their helmets as Green lowers her head to the ground. A meteor streaks by overhead, a silver gash across the sky, and Hunk catches a glimpse of Pidge’s glove, so shredded it leaves most of her palm bare. He doesn’t know when it happened, but when Pidge catches him looking, she hastily crosses her arms, tucking her hands up into her armpits.

“Pidge...”

“It’s fine,” she says. “It ripped before we fell in the first time, and I didn’t die. Don’t worry about it.”

As if it’s that easy. Hunk doesn’t argue, though; he’s far too tired. It’s been less than a day since the spores dragged them into the rift, but it feels more like a year. A lifetime, even. All Hunk wants is to get home, hug Lance and Shiro, and sleep for the next twelve vargas.

The ground beneath them shakes, and Hunk reaches out on instinct to steady Pidge. His mind goes at once to earthquakes and fault lines, to volcanic eruptions and landslides, and it takes him too long to remember that he’s on a barren moon. There’s a thin atmosphere here, but the ground beneath him is solid rock and ice—no fault lines, no molten core, no mantle with magma to fuel a volcano.

He remembers the streak of silver in the sky at the same moment Shiro charges over a rocky outcropping. With his Galra suit sealed against the thin atmosphere, freezing temperatures, and high Quintessence levels, he’s nearly unrecognizable, and the deep shadows cast by the rift’s glow only make him look more like a being of darkness and fury. Only his cybernetic arm, burning bright enough to rival the rift itself, gives him away.

Pidge, her shoulders squared up as she stands on the edge of the rift, doesn’t see him coming. A warning springs to Hunk’s lips, but he already knows it’s too late. Shiro is right on top of her, hand drawn back to kill.

Hunk doesn’t have to think. He throws himself forward, planting a hand between Pidge’s shoulder blades and shoving her into the rift. She teeters, windmilling desperately in an attempt to regain her balance, a curse on her lips. Her hand closes around Hunk’s arm as she falls, and they tumble together as Shiro’s hand _slams_ into Hunk’s sternum. Something crunches, the sound reverberating through his body. He’s pretty sure there should be pain, but he doesn’t feel it. All he feels is a burning in his lungs and a prickling in his eyes as he falls, and falls.

* * *

Pidge tumbles, the sudden loss of gravity, of shadow, of solid ground disorienting her until she can hardly tell where her own body ends. Her palm already tingles with a sudden influx of Quintessence, nerves that never fully quieted humming with fresh energy. She feels like she might burst from it; she wants to cry.

She flails, keeping a tight hold on Hunk’s hand as she spins around and around in the void, and finally catches sight of the rift overhead (behind her? beneath her?) She holds her breath, and it isn’t until the edges begin to fracture, golden light rushing inward, consuming the dark scar in the sky, that she allows herself to acknowledge what she had feared: that Shiro might come after them. That she and Hunk might be forced to kill him just to keep him from killing them.

She’s not sure it’s any better, leaving him in his own reality, but his team at least has the time and resources to look into a way to force Haggar from his mind.

It’s a thin hope, and maybe it would be more merciful to simply end him, rather than forcing him to face the fact that he killed three of his friends. But that’s a choice that’s better left up to the people who watched him lose himself.

Pidge watches, silent, until the rift disappears altogether, the last hairline crack bleeding away into mist. Then, she breathes out. “Well, that’s one thing taken care of,” she says, turning to Hunk. “Now, any ideas how to find our way back--”

Words flee her as she catches sight of him. His eyes are open and staring at something beyond her, his lips slightly parted as though in surprise. But there’s a hole in his chest, splinters of armor floating around him like tiny satellites, the jagged edges of the hole reminiscent of a second rib cage, pale spurs almost but not quite joining in the middle.

He’s not moving.

“Hunk?” Pidge whispers. She pulls him closer by their linked hands, and suddenly his vice-like grip on her wrist doesn’t seem the desperate grasp of someone afraid of getting separated in zero G.

He’s not _moving._

“Hunk?” She reaches out with her other hand, but stops short of touching him. She doesn’t know why. There’s very little blood—at least, she can only make out the little bit that stains the tips of the armor spurs like ink stains on fingertips. The rest of it is lost to the black of his undersuit. (That, at least, doesn’t appear to be compromised, though it lays strangely across his chest, like the flesh beneath has been hollowed out.)

_He’s not moving._

Golden light condenses on the edges of his armor, running down to the blood-stained points and dripping into the wound, little luminous raindrops come to fill the hollow where his life should be. The light traces abstract patterns across his chest, across his face. It’s dimmed somewhat by his visor, but she sees it vanish into his hairline, bleaching white what escaped the transformation before. It seeps into his eyes, too, filling them with liquid gold until he looks like a shell of himself.

The light fades.

Hunk doesn’t move.

Pidge doesn’t move either. She doesn’t know what’s keeping the grief at bay, whether hope or disbelief or pure shock, but she doesn’t feel the loss, not in any tangible way. Hunk’s not moving, not even breathing, but it doesn’t… process. It’s not happening to her. She’s watching someone else’s life, her life in another reality, and if she can just make it home, she’ll wake up to find that none of this was real.

She doesn’t try to find her way home.

She just… drifts, watching Hunk’s face for any signs of recovery (as if there’s recovery from… this.) She feels eyes on her at one point, but it’s some time before she can look up and meet the gaze of the Hunter. She knows that’s what this is, though here in the rift it’s plainly made up of hundreds, _thousands_ , of spores. They slide over one another, a mass of constant motion despite the figure as a whole staying perfectly still.

It watches her with unseen eyes, and she wonders whether it’s come to finish the job. If it has, she won’t stop it. She has no wish to die, but she has no particular desire to live, either. Living is an awfully heavy burden to bear without Hunk there to share the load.

After a moment, the creature turns away, and the spores that make up its body disperse, scattering on unseen winds.

Then Pidge truly is alone.

Hunk still has not moved, and the reality of it finally sinks in.

He’s dead. He died. Shiro’s attack should have killed Pidge _,_ but Hunk got in the way, and now he’s _dead._

The tears come then, which is something of a surprise. She didn’t think she had any emotion left to spend. It tears out of her, scraping the very bottom of her soul, rising from her lips in wordless cries of agony. She pulls Hunk closer and wedges herself against his side, his hand still clutched in hers, his other arm bumping occasionally against her back as he drifts, lifeless. Quintessence soaks into her palm through the tear in her suit, and she lets it. She doesn’t care anymore.

Hunk is gone.

She clings to him, and cries, and rides the currents of the hurricane building in her blood until, some hours later, Lance finds her and brings her home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Check out Kintora's art for this chapter!](http://theproof-is-in-the-pudding.tumblr.com/post/171156073000/eventhorizon)


	4. Through the Night

They put Hunk in a healing pod.

It doesn’t help.

Pidge isn’t surprised by this, of course. Healing pods aren’t really that much more than an acceleration of the natural healing process. They can fix wounds that are a little too severe to survive on Earth, they heal a little more cleanly, so you don’t end up with scars or stiffness.

But they can’t undo death.

Still, she sits there, stiff-backed on the floor in the center of the pod room. Staring. The storm inside her rages on, stronger than it’s ever been. It screams at her to do something— _anything—_ but she can’t. Her mind is a buzz of static trapped inside a frozen shell. The world around her barely makes it through to where she huddles inside herself, and her few, tentative attempts to break herself out of her stupor fizzle as soon as her questing mind meets the resistance of a body that doesn’t want to move.

She can’t forget the surprised look on Hunk’s face when he died. Which is stupid. _Pidge_ is the one who didn’t see Shiro until it was too late. Hunk saw. He knew exactly what he was doing. What right does _he_ have to look so shocked?

There’s still three vargas—a little over four hours—left in their quarantine. That _does_ surprise her; she would have guessed she’d been in the rift with Hunk’s corpse for a day or two. Whatever. She doubts she’ll be leaving until the quarantine is over, though she doesn’t know how useful a deadline it is anymore. It was arbitrary to start, and Hunk only… Well. If she’s waiting for him to turn undead, she ought to start counting at their second trip into the rift, not the first.

On top of that, he’s been in a cryopod since they got back, and Pidge has no way of knowing if that changes things.

Still, she sits, ignoring the others who join her in shifts. Lance was the first to sit vigil with her, red-eyed and shivering, along with Matt, who kept asking Pidge what happened. She didn’t say anything; the snowy hair on Hunk’s head and her own reflection in the cryopod’s glass speaks for itself, and saying Shiro is the one who killed Hunk in another reality—twice, as a point of fact—seems needlessly cruel.

The Quintessence healed his wounds.

It’s a strange thing to notice, but she’s been staring at him for hours now, staring so long and hard her eyes have gone dry and started watering all over again, so she’s confident there are no wounds left. His armor is ruined, his undersuit sticky with drying blood, but the pod can’t identify a cause of death. Pidge heard Allura and Coran whispering about it, sometime during the chaos of her return. Lance was screaming into Keith’s shoulder, Keith looking desperately to Shiro for aid, and Matt was clinging to Pidge, his words blurring with his tears as Pidge, numb, rubbed his back. Through it all, Allura and Coran whispered frantically about blood and armor and a rib cage that should have caved in but hadn’t.

(Except it _had_ ; she _saw_ it. And now it was fixed.)

They know.

Pidge doesn’t think the others have made the connection yet between Hunk’s unbroken corpse and what happened to Zarkon and Honerva ten thousand years ago. But the Alteans have and, like Pidge, they’re caught between hope and fear. Hope that Hunk might return to them. Fear that he won’t be the Hunk they know.

Time passes. Lance’s screams subside into sobs, and then into silence. Allura and Coran disappear with Keith, and all three return. Shiro excuses himself and returns with a face that belies the tears he refuses to shed in front of the rest of them. Lance disappears into his embrace. Coran drapes a blanket around Pidge’s shoulders.

Shadows lurk at the edges of the room, and Pidge’s mind tries to turn them into the Hunter. They’re ordinary shadows, though. She can tell. There’s nothing watching her here. Why should there be? She’s home.

That’s all it wanted, she thinks. To send her back where she belonged—or at least to pull her out of where she _didn’t_ belong. She wonders, idly, whether they left the other reality, the one with Sven and the other Slav, too quickly for the Hunter to find them, or if by entering through the anomaly surrounding the meteor they deprived the Hunter of it entrance into that universe. Maybe it can only travel through rifts. Slav would probably know. She should ask him.

“So how are you holding up?”

Pidge turns, somewhat surprised to see Keith standing over her. She remembers Lance leaving, hardly an hour after they put Hunk in the pod, hurrying on unsteady feet, one hand on his stomach, the other clawing at his collar. He looked moments from either passing out or puking, and Shiro chased after him to make sure he was going to be okay. The others left soon after. Gone to talk about the unpleasant business of what to do with the body, probably. Wasn’t like the castle-ship had a graveyard to bury him in.

(She realizes, with a detached sort of horror, that she doesn’t know whether Hunk _wants_ to be buried. Would he rather they cremate him? Something else? They haven’t talked about it, none of them. They don’t like acknowledging the possibility that one of them might die. She wishes they’d talked about it more before it happened.)

Only Matt stayed with her through it all. He talked for a while, tried more than once to hold her, though she pushed him away each time. The Quintessence beneath her skin and the fresh memory of the other Matt’s screams make his touch a hot iron, searing her mistakes into her skin.

She’s not sure when he left, or where he went, but she doesn’t complain when Keith takes a seat beside her. He doesn’t try to touch her.

He looks awkward, sitting there in his Blade uniform. They don’t talk often—maybe not as much as they should—but there’s an unspoken understanding between them. They _get_ each other in a way the others don’t, and silence between them is comfortable. Usually. Thing is, he’s not exactly the comforting type. That’s more Lance’s area, or Shiro’s. Except Lance is a wreck right now, and he needs Shiro to comfort _him._ Usually it would be Coran who stepped up next. He’s always good for a distraction, and usually a surprising gem of advice. Or Hunk—he always has a hug ready.

_Had._

He always _had_ a hug ready.

Keith, like Pidge herself, usually leaves the emotional stuff to the others. It’s not that either of them are bad people. They just… aren’t good with things like this. Yet here Keith is, in all his awkward, earnest glory.

He looks… thin. Tired. His eyes are puffy, though Pidge doesn’t remember him crying at any point during this nightmare. The sharp set of his jaw says a comment on his tears (or lack thereof) wouldn’t be appreciated just now, so Pidge holds her tongue.

Honestly, he looks like the other version of himself, the one trying too hard to fill Shiro’s armor. He looks like someone unused to loss, though she knows he’s lost more than any of the rest of them except the Alteans. Hunk’s loss caught him off-guard, it seems. Their months together have worn down the defensive walls he built for himself, and that left him vulnerable.

Pidge wraps her arms around herself and leans into him. He stiffens, then curls an arm around her shoulders. Pidge couldn’t say which of them is comforting the other, but she thinks this is something they both need.

“How long were we in there?” Her voice is dry and scratchy from disuse. She thinks someone might have already answered this question, but if they did it was while her brain was still hazy with disbelief and hurt, and she has no recollection of what was said.

“Half a day?” Keith shrugs. “I’m not really sure. It was… I didn’t really slow down long enough to think about what time it was. I got the call that something had happened, and I raced out this way to help look for you. It’s all kind of a blur, but you were gone long enough that Allura brought up the possibility that you were both dead. That the best thing might be for us to collapse the rift before Lotor found it. Lance never gave up, though. He didn’t let us stop the search.” Pausing, Keith pulls her closer. “I’m glad we listened to him.”

_I’m not._

It’s a bleak thought, and Pidge doesn’t know where it came from. She’s not… She doesn’t _wish_ she was dead. She _does_ have to wonder whether a clean break would have been easier for the rest of them, though.

“Is it closed now?” she asks.

“Sort of. Shiro took Black and collapsed the area immediately around the rift. That muted the readings coming off it, and it blocked the actual opening, but the rift is still there. The moon’s too big for any one lion to destroy it, and we’ve all been...”

“Yeah,” Pidge whispers. Her ticker beeps, and she looks down at it, heart sinking. The quarantine is over. It doesn’t mean anything, yet it makes all this seem more… _real_ , somehow. More final. She looks once more at Hunk, ashen and still in the pod, then sighs, stands, and heads for the door.

“Pidge?”

“I need to clear my head,” she says, pretending not to hear the question Keith won’t put into words. “I’ll be with Green if anyone needs me.”

He doesn’t try to stop her as she leaves.

* * *

Hunk wakes slowly. The cold surrounds him, _fills_ him, but he doesn’t _feel_ cold. He feels…

Nothing.

That’s a relief, somehow, though he doesn’t know why. His head is too cloudy, stuffed full of indigo shadows and golden light. Where is he? What happened? The last thing he remembers… The last thing…

He doesn’t know. It’s all hitting him in the wrong order, memories bludgeoning his overtaxed mind like snowflakes tumbling through a hazy sky. His moms. Zarkon. His dog. The ocean. A hole in the universe. Lance and Pidge, the other boys on his squad—only Pidge is Katie and Katie is a girl and all three of them dropped out of the Garrison. (Dropped out? _Left._ He should be ashamed of that, but for some reason he doesn’t regret it.)

The Yellow Lion sticks in Hunk’s head, one solitary nail holding the birdhouse together. Everything else still shifts in a vaguely nauseating way, but Yellow is… Yellow is _important._

He can’t remember why.

He opens his eyes to find that someone has locked him in a glass display case, like a specimen in a zoo. Anxiety stirs, but it’s far off. It doesn’t choke him like it usually does, just pools hot in his gut as he squints to see through the frost-encrusted glass.

Keith sits on the floor outside, arms curled around his head. He looks small and weary, and Hunk thinks he should feel some degree of sympathy, except for the voice whispering that it’s all an act. He does that, doesn’t he? Lie, play pretend. It’s so easy for Keith to put on a mask that he does it without thinking, even when no one’s watching. Hunk can’t let himself be drawn in.

 _What?_ Hunk shakes his head, trying to dislodge the thought. It belongs to someone else—it has to, because Hunk has never known Keith to be anything but honest. Even when they disagree, even when Keith tries to hide something he doesn’t want the others to see, his expressive face and guileless nature beat him out.

Or maybe… maybe that in itself is the lie. Hunk can’t remember.

A rush of air escapes Keith. He’s looking up now, his eyes wide as he meets Hunk’s gaze. For a moment they remain frozen, just staring at each other. The haze in Hunk’s head must have bled over to Keith’s, because he doesn’t seem fully there. His eyes dart back and forth, and his mouth opens twice, though no sound issues forth.

He stands abruptly, and Hunk thinks for a moment Keith is going to release him from the pod—pod? Yes. He’s in a cryopod, on the Castle of Lions. He recognizes the room now. Why is he in here? Was he hurt? Images flicker at the edges of his vision. Gold and magenta light, yellow eyes, a crack in the ground.

Keith stumbles back, hand fumbling at the console in the center of the room. Hunk breathes, steadying his uneven pulse as he waits for the pod to spit him out. It must be malfunctioning; it’s always released him before he’s fully conscious. He’s never been properly grateful for that before, but the truth is it’s kind of claustrophobic in here. Lance has good reason to be scared of these things.

Lance.

Just the thought of him makes Hunk’s breath falter, panic flashing loud in his mind. Something happened to Lance. What happened to Lance?

Keith hits a button on the console, but the glass hemming Hunk in doesn’t budge. The air in here is running thin, and Hunk’s vision darkens at the edges. The emotions he’s been holding at arms length are starting to creep back in, but he doesn’t want this. He doesn’t want to feel. Better to be numb, to be empty. He doesn’t want to be afraid.

“Keith?” That’s Allura’s voice, slurred with fatigue and raw with another emotion Hunk can’t name. The glass mutes the conversation, but not so much that he can’t make it out. “Is everything all right?”

Keith stares at Hunk, unblinking. “Hunk’s awake.”

There’s silence on the other end of the line, then a sudden clatter, and Allura’s voice returns, much closer than it was before. “ _What?_ Are you certain?”

Hunk presses his palm to the glass, testing it for weakness. He doesn’t understand why Keith isn’t letting him out. Is he… Is he a prisoner here? No, that’s absurd. (But is it, really? Didn’t they hold him prisoner once before—Keith and Allura and Matt?)

“Pretty sure, yeah.” Keith’s voice shakes, and a flash of light stings Hunk’s eyes as Keith draws his dagger and activates it. “Allura… his eyes are yellow.”

Allura curses. “Keith, listen to me. I will be there as soon as I can, but until then you _must not_ let Hunk out of the pod. Do you hear me?”

Keith nods, then licks his lips. “Yeah,” he says. “I can do that… Are you far?”

Hunk doesn’t hear Allura’s response. The conversation rebounds in his head, flinging accusations every which way. Keith’s sword is a charcoal strike across his vision. They _are_ holding him prisoner. _Why?_ He feels like he should have expected this, but that doesn’t stop it from hurting. Keith and Allura are (were?) his friends. He _trusted_ them.

He doesn’t realize he’s pushing against the glass until it shatters, glittering shards raining down, first in a torrent, then in a drizzle as the last few fragments cling to their perches. Keith jerks back, the color draining from his face. Hunk wants to comfort him, wants to attack him. The Yellow Lion rumbles in his head for an instant, and then goes silent.

Cold horror floods into the bond before that, too, is snatched back. The absence is somehow worse than the horror, if only for the wall that resists Hunk’s quiet attempts to reconnect.

 _**No,** _ Yellow says. _**No!** _

Somewhere far-off, a lion roars. Hunk doesn’t think it’s Yellow.

Keith stumbles back, sword held point-down and angled behind him as the other hand comes up in a placating gesture. “Hunk?” he calls, nervous. “Hunk, is that you? It’s me. Keith. We’re friends?”

Hunk laughs at that, and Keith flinches. “I know who you are, Kogane,” Hunk growls. “And I can’t believe you can keep a straight face when you call us friends.”

That seems to strike a nerve. (Why?) Keith breathes in sharply, straightens, swings his sword around. His hand is shaking. ( _Why?_ ) He isn’t attacking yet (whywhy _why?_ ) and for a second, Hunk’s wrath falters, other memories trying to force their way to the forefront.

Footsteps, running.

The door hisses open, and Shiro stumbles in, his arm glowing bright enough to make Hunk’s eyes water. There’s a world contained in that glow—blood and cries of pain, flashing lasers and Lance—Lance, drifting. Limp. Cold. _Dead._

 _Lance isn’t here because he’s_ dead! _Shiro killed him._

No.

Hunk takes a single step back, his heel crunching on broken glass. No, this isn’t right. Shiro shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be—why? _How?_ Why haven’t the others chased him off? Unless… they don’t know? No. No, Keith was the one who told Hunk what happened. So why is he falling back beside Shiro, the both of them facing down Hunk like _he’s_ the criminal?

Hunk’s bayard falls into his hand, only it isn’t the bayard he remembers. It’s a war hammer—lighter than the cannon he usually wields, but still with considerable heft. Ten, maybe fifteen pounds of whatever unbreakable Altean metal the bayards are made of. He can imagine the kind of damage a weapon like this could do.

Before he can attack, Lance stumbles in, gasping for breath, eyes wide when they land on Hunk, and something inside Hunk _shifts._

“Lance?” It feels like a stranger talking. (It sounds more like himself than anything he’s said since he woke up.)

“Hunk!” Lance’s voice breaks, and he surges forward, but Shiro stops him with a hand on his shoulder. Lance jerks to a stop, tugging against Shiro’s unyielding grip.

The world tilts back into focus. Hunk finds his footing. No. He was confused before, that’s all. Shiro _tried_ to kill Lance, just like he _tried_ to kill Hunk. Just because he failed doesn’t make him any less a murderer.

Hunk charges before he has time to think better of it. Shiro tenses, locking up. Hunk sees his fear, his indecision, in the instant before he arrives, hammer swinging for Shiro’s unprotected head. At the last second, Shiro drops Lance’s arm and raises his hands to shield himself.

The hammer falls.

Someone shouts. (Lance? _Keith?_ Both.)

Shiro’s left arm snaps audibly. The hammer slides sideways off his right arm with a dull rasp and strikes a glancing blow to his skull—but even a glancing blow sends him staggering, a line of red trailing down the side of his face. He falls. He doesn’t move.

* * *

This is a nightmare.

There’s no other explanation. Nothing makes sense, except if Lance passed out somewhere and his fatigued, grief-stained thoughts conjured darker horrors, even than he found in the waking world.

Hunk.

Alive, yes, but that fact isn’t as comforting as it should be. Especially because Lance is pretty sure he just killed Shiro.

“Fuck,” Keith hisses, voice strident with alarm. “Fuck. Shiro!”

He starts forward, and Hunk swings at him. “Get away,” Hunk growls.

Keith dances back, his sword darting higher. “What the _hell_ , Hunk?! Look at him—he needs help!”

“Get _away_ ,” Hunk repeats, like he didn’t even hear Keith. Like he can’t see that Shiro is bleeding and limp as a sodden paper doll on the floor. Lance holds his breath until he sees that Shiro’s chest still rises and falls, but even that is a thin comfort.

“Shiro needs me,” Keith growls. “Don’t make me fight you, Hunk—I won’t hold back.”

Hunk’s eyes flash that unnatural Galra yellow, spewing violet embers like afterimages across Lance’s vision. “I won’t say it again, Keith. Get. Away. From Lance.”

The air rushes out of Lance, leaves him gaping at Hunk. Keith seems similarly taken aback. His sword wavers, and he shoots a look toward Lance, who can do nothing but shrug.

“What are you talking about?” Keith demands. “What do you think I’m going to do to Lance?”

“I don’t know, probably the same thing as Shiro, seeing as you two are obviously working together.”

“ _What?_ ” Keith grits his teeth, visibly struggling for control. “Of _course_ we’re working together, Hunk. We’re _all_ working together. We’re _paladins?_ ”

Hunk slams his hammer into the wall, leaving a deep dent in the metal. “ _Don’t play dumb!_ ” he roars. “You know what I mean!”

Lance raises his hands. “Uh… no, buddy, we _really_ don’t.”

Hunk’s eyes dart his way, brow furrowing. As soon as he turns back to Keith, the expression eases back into raw fury. “Shiro tried to kill Lance. He tried to kill _me_! I’m not letting either of you touch Lance again.”

There’s something chilling in Hunk’s tone, for all it burns with the heat of a supernova. His eyes, overbright and reminiscent of the rift, bore into Keith like he’s trying to figure out the best way to take him apart.

“What are you talking about?” Keith whispers. The anger has all drained out of him, leaving him pale and shaking. His eyes dart again to Shiro, who still hasn’t moved.

Pounding footsteps precede the hiss of the automatic door, and Hunk whirls, hammer held high as Allura comes charging in with Matt and Coran.

Hunk’s eyes widen, then narrow to golden slits. “ _You,_ ” he growls. “This is _your_ fault.”

Lance can’t tell which of them he’s pointing to, but he’s not about to let him smash someone else’s brain in. He slides into the space between Hunk and the others, gut churning as Matt, horrified, whispers Shiro’s name.

“Woah, there, big guy,” Lance says in his most charming voice. “Let’s just take a second and calm down here, why don’t we? Those are our friends, remember? _Friends_.” He enunciates the word carefully, drawing it out, searching Hunk’s eyes for a reaction. Aside from a slight lowering of the hammer—more so that it’s not pointed directly at Lance than a sign of easing tension—he gets nothing.

“Lance.” Hunk meets his eye, gaze so intense Lance nearly has to look away. “Stay out of this.”

Before Lance can protest, Hunk puts a hand on his shoulder and scoots him out of the way. He stalks forward, Lance clinging to his arm, his face contorting with rage as he closes in on the others. Matt and Coran draw the bulk of his attention, it seems; Allura only warrants a threatening swing when she tries to edge around the confrontation to get to Shiro.

Keith and Allura both have their weapons out, and though neither moves to attack, just the sight of the weapons darkens Hunk’s expression.

 _He could kill them,_ Lance thinks, floating on the surface of disbelief as Matt and Coran—unarmed but tensed for a fight—back away, Keith and Allura closing ranks between them and Hunk.

Whatever _thing_ it is wearing Hunk’s skin now, it could kill them all without a second thought.

It doesn’t feel real, any of it. Shiro’s still form, Hunk’s enraged expression, the frost in the air—leaking out of the busted cryopod? Are those things _that_ powerful? The whole med bay feels like an industrial cooler.

“Why are you taking their side?” Hunk demands. He’s shaking, shivering top to bottom so bad Lance expects him to drop to the floor in hysterics—except this isn’t Hunk’s usual anxiety. This is _rage_ , pure and straining at the reins.

For the first time, Lance is genuinely afraid of his best friend.

“There are no sides here, Hunk,” Allura says in a reasonable tone. “I know you’re upset, but fighting isn’t going to solve anything.”

“They killed me—tried--” Hunk breaks off, blinking rapidly. “Tried to—tried to kill me.” He presses a hand to his forehead. “No… No. _Shiro._ Shiro killed me.” He turns to where Shiro lays, looking for all the universe like he intends to finish the job.

Lance steps in front of Hunk before Keith does something stupid. “Hunk. Buddy. Come on. Listen to me—you can listen to me, can’t you?”

Hunk stares, tilting his head to the side. “Lance…?”

“Yeah. That’s right. It’s me. You know where you are?”

Hunk looks around, brow furrowing. “I’m… I’m home.”

“Uh...” Lance looks to Coran, who gestures for Lance to keep talking. He’s sidled up to one of the medical supply lockers in the wall near the door, which Lance hopes means he has a plan. Lance, for one is drawing a blank. “Okay, yeah,” he says. “Sure. I guess this is home now, kinda. Do you remember who you are?”

Hunk gives Lance an exasperated look that’s painfully familiar. If not for those yellow eyes, he would look almost back to normal, bemused by Lance’s latest antics.

Lance smiles weakly. “Humor me?”

Hunk sighs. “I’m Hunk,” he says.

“And I’m…?”

“Lance.”

“Uh-huh. And… do you know who that is?” Lance almost gestures to Keith before he remembers Coran’s probably-better-kept-secret plan and flings his hand toward Shiro instead.

Hunk’s lips purse. “Shiro.” His voice twists in on the name, spiraling down to a depth of hatred Hunk just isn’t capable of. Oh, he can be bitter and petty, and he can certainly dislike someone—he hated Iverson as much as he feared him, back when a passive-aggressive C.O. was all they had to worry about.

This? This is pure bile, spat at Shiro like _he’s_ the evil alien dictator making their lives hell.

“I don’t get it,” Keith says, stalking forward. Lance flails at him to back off, or at least put his Blade away, but it’s too late. Hunk sees the weapon, and whatever fragment of calm Lance managed to tease out sinks back beneath the surface as Hunk growls. Keith ignores it, of course. “What the hell is your problem with Shiro? What’s he ever done to you?”

“He _killed_ me!” Hunk cries. A thread of genuine hurt works its way through his voice. “He killed _Lance!_ ”

Lance touches Hunk’s arm, flinching back as the hammer twitches in his direction. “Hunk. _Hunk._ Think about that for a second, would you? Are you dead? Am I?”

“He _tried_ ,” Hunk says, like it’s the same thing. “I know what I know, Lance.”

Shiro stirs, a soft, pained sigh escaping him. A moment of perfect stillness follows, every eye on Shiro as his hand twitches, pulling in like he means to push himself up off the floor but can’t work up the energy, and Lance sees the situation laid out in perfect clarity.

Shiro, helpless on the floor. Hunk, rage blotting out any hope of reason, lifts his hammer and begins to charge. Behind him, panic floods Keith’s face and he gives chase, sword flashing in the lights of the med bay.

Lance is faster than either of them. He throws himself at Hunk, grabbing his wrist before he can swing his hammer. They spin, wrestling, and Keith shouts Lance’s name. Something bites into his side. It’s just a little pinch, and so Lance is somewhat surprised when a gunmetal gray sword appears from the space between his ribs and his arm and plunges, tip-first, into the hole in Hunk’s armor.

Blood, hot and slick, slides down Lance’s side beneath his armor, but Hunk doesn’t bleed. Golden light spills out around Keith’s sword, and Keith’s cursing grows suddenly more emphatic. He scrambles back, voice tinged bright with fear and not a little anger, as the trickle of light becomes a flood. Lance squints, pressing his free hand to his wounded side while the other maintains its hold on Hunk’s wrist, and watches in horror and fascination as Hunk’s wound knits itself back together.

The light fades, and its like it never even happened.

“Lance?”

Hunk’s voice is faint, trembling with emotion. Lance tears his eyes away from the new hole in Hunk’s undersuit and finds Hunk looking alternately at the blood dripping down Lance’s armor, stark against the white, and at the hand wrapped around his wrist. He looks like he doesn’t know how to react. Betrayal chases guilt chases fear and fury and confusion.

He pulls back. The bayard vanishes from his hand.

Lance stumbles after him, wincing as the movement tugs at his wound. “Hunk--” he starts, but it’s too late. Eyes blazing gold, Hunk turns and flees. Lance tries to lunge after him, only to cry out in pain. Coran catches him before he can fall, hastily setting a syringe aside.

“Sedatives,” Coran says, seeing where Lance’s eyes have gone. “Still probably our best plan, but I think we have more important issues to deal with at the moment.”

Lance turns. Keith has his arms looped under Shiro’s shoulders, Allura lifts his legs, and the two of them carry him to a cryopod—not the one Hunk came out of, but the one next to it. Matt watches them for a moment, restless, his arms wrapped around his midsection, and then he turns and crosses to the center console.

“Pidge?” he calls over the comms. “Pidge, are you there?”

“Matt?” Pidge sounds horrible, her voice scratchy and slurred, and Lance wonders if she finally gave into all the prodding and left in search of sleep. That’s just how it would go—she finally relents, and then things go to hell.

“Where are you?”

“With Green?” Pidge says slowly. “Why? What’s wrong?”

Matt shakes his head. “Just—just stay where you are. I’m coming to get you.” He lets up on the intercom button, then thinks twice and depresses it again. “Don’t—don’t let anyone else in. _No one_ else. Okay?”

Lance can _hear_ Pidge frowning in confusion. “O...kay?”

“Good. I’ll be there in five.” Matt switches off the comms, turns and glances at Shiro’s cryopod. “How is he?”

“Stable,” Allura says, peering at the readout beside the pod. “It’s still finishing its diagnostic cycle, but he should be fine in a few vargas.”

Keith breathes an almost imperceptible sigh of relief, then tenses again as he looks at Lance. “What about you? I didn’t—I wasn’t trying to hit you.”

Lance bites down on the obvious retort. He _was_ trying to hit Hunk, and he couldn’t have known that Hunk would heal from it. (But Shiro was in danger, and even Lance doesn’t know if Hunk is really _Hunk_ anymore.)

“I’m fine,” Lance says. “Maybe spend an hour in a pod when this is over.” He pulls his hand away from his ribs. It’s not bleeding as bad as he thought, but it _is_ bleeding. He looks hopefully at Coran. “You got a bandage or something?”

That’s when the power cuts out.

* * *

Pidge is already wired from the Quintessence in her blood. She’s already geared up by everything that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours, up to and including the distant roar that rattled the rafters five minutes ago. She’s pushed right to the edge of composure by Matt’s creepy-ass warning. Seriously. Who calls to say, _Don’t worry, stay where you are, and oh, by the way, our friend may have just turned into an evil zombie so don’t let him find you_?

Okay, so Matt didn’t say it in so many words, but Pidge can read between the lines. She knows what happened to Zarkon and Honerva. She knows it could easily have happened the same way to Hunk.

The lights going out is really just the cherry on top of this shit pie.

Okay. Okay. She can deal with this. Green’s still in perfect working order, the interior of her cockpit lit a soft green, her particle barrier illuminating the hangar. It’s a little worrying that Green felt the need to raise her shield, but maybe that’s just Matt’s warning at work. Or maybe Green can tell how on edge Pidge is and wants to help her feel safe. Sweet, but kind of counter-productive, assuming death _isn’t_ actually coming for her. Shadows cling to the rafters and stretch out behind Pidge’s desk, too reminiscent of other, less innocuous shadows for comfort, but she’s safe as long as she stays in here.

She’s _safe._

“Matt?” Pidge calls cautiously, pressing her hand to the side of her helmet. “Are you there?”

Static. Perfect. Whatever knocked out the lights must have cut power to the comms in the med bay, too. But that wouldn’t affect the lions or the paladin armor. If anyone else is wearing their armor. _Is_ anyone wearing their armor? Keith was in his when he came to sit with her, but he didn’t have his helmet with him. Lance, the one who went spelunking in the rift and pulled Pidge and Hunk out, might still be wearing his, too, if he hasn’t changed, but Shiro and Allura were in regular clothes last she saw.

She tries anyway, cycling through the open channel and each private channel in turn, and pretends she’s not disappointed when no one answers.

“Looks like it’s just you and me, girl,” Pidge says, patting Green’s console. The lion rumbles softly in answer, reassurance that’s somewhat compromised by an electric current of unease that makes Pidge sit up straighter. “What is it? Is something wrong?”

A lion—not Green—roars. Even without the paladin bond, Pidge swears that roar cuts right to the center of her, fear and anger thrumming in the sound.

“What the--? What was _that_?”

Green resists her prodding for a moment, but then, as another lion joins the first with a mournful croon, Green relents. The stream of images that hit Pidge in that first instant flattens her against the seat, pressure closing around her skull like a vice. She might scream; she can’t be sure. Certainly she’s left gasping when Green hastily pulls back. Pidge clamps shaking hands down on the armrests and grits her teeth.

“Show me again,” she demands.

The images return, more slowly this time. They ease her into the bond. It’s not the usual bond, though, not the one Pidge shares with Green. It’s something she’s experienced only rarely, and only ever as part of a Voltron formation, when all five lions and all five pilots merge into one. This is the lion bond, the currents of thought and data constantly streaming from one lion to the next. They are, in a very real sense, a single consciousness, split into five pieces. Voltron is their natural state, and Pidge can only assume this bond is their way of coping with the separation. It’s a little bit like telepathy, a little bit like an internal monologue in five voices, and a little bit like standing at the center of a rally, voices shouting all around and fighting each other to be heard.

The Black Lion roars the loudest—that’s who Pidge keeps hearing, all the way from the heart of the castle. Even filtered through Green, her panic is overpowering. Flashes of pain, of darkness, of Zarkon—Zarkon before, with a gentle laugh and a pinch of exasperation as he pulls Alfor back from the brink of disaster, and Zarkon after, with glowing eyes and a coldness in his center.

There are images of Hunk mixed in. Smiling, laughing, cooking, standing defiant before a Galra horde. A paladin. A hero.

Some of the images repeat, except Hunk now stands in for Zarkon. The same glowing eyes, the same cold smile, and an army hanging on his every word.

Pidge recoils from the images, though Black’s fear chases her. _**Not you,** _ she says. _**Don’t let it happen to you, too.** _

_**He wouldn’t.** _

The thought seems to arise from Pidge herself, but it isn’t her voice that speaks. Yellow, she thinks. He’s nearly as frantic as Black herself, but there’s protectiveness blended in. Pidge catches a glimpse through his eyes at the hangar in the southeast tower. It’s dark—as dark as Green’s own hangar—and lit with a faint yellow-orange light from the barrier.

Hunk stands before his lion, the barrier’s glow casting him in shifting tones that make him almost unrecognizable. His eyes burn like two coals in the darkness, and it’s all too easy to imagine that it’s Zarkon staring back at her, his chest lost in a dark, gaping wound. The images from Black’s memories fuzz over the top of what Yellow sees now, confusing everything still more.

Green’s awareness seeps back into Pidge’s mind, blotting out the other lions. She catches an instant of concern from Blue and restlessness from Red, and then it’s just her and Green, and suddenly she understands—Black’s fear, Yellow’s stubbornness, the unspoken understanding running between all five lions. They’ve seen this before. They know what it means.

And so does Pidge.

She’s on her feet in a heartbeat, settling her helmet over her head and running for the door before she can stop to think how dangerous this plan is. (But then, does it matter? She has one shot. She’s going to take it, whatever the risk.)

Green lowers the barrier to let Pidge pass, and the room plunges into darkness for a moment before the shield returns. Green purrs encouragement, but Pidge knows—she’s on her own in this. She can’t reach the others, and the lions won’t— _can’t—_ do anything. Not with the stakes as high as they are.

At least she was paying attention when she watched Hunk override the door locks on the other castle-ship. With that and a little power boost from her suit, she should be able to get where she needs to be.

 _God,_ she hopes this works.

* * *

Yellow isn’t responding to him.

It takes Hunk a long time—too long—to wrap his head around this fact. His lion, his Yellow, his literal and metaphorical rock out here in this war… He’s locking Hunk out. Hunk tries everything he can think of to get through to him—sweet talking, begging, bargaining, threatening. He pounds on the barrier, he drops to his knees. He even, once, swings his hammer in a vain attempt to break through, but the flash of pain and fear that seeps through the remnants of their bond stops him from trying a second time.

(Though, really, if it’s some kind of malfunction that’s making Yellow shut him out, like it almost certainly is, then the pain is probably part of the same root problem. The lion is a machine, and Hunk is its rightful user. Why _shouldn’t_ he get a little rough with it? He can just fix it later.)

Something about that line of reasoning makes him uncomfortable, though it’s difficult to put his finger on what. His thoughts keep sliding away from him, fading back into the gold and leaving him…

He doesn’t know. But he doesn’t like it.

Yellow nudges at Hunk’s mind, apologetic, and for just a moment he forgets the fog in his head. Something’s still wrong, and the barrier is still up, but Yellow assures him he’s not acting out of any malicious intent.

One of the other lions roars again, and Yellow lifts his head, tilting it to one side. After a moment, he makes a sound so much like a snort that Hunk cracks a smile, though there’s still a weight in his chest he can’t shake.

 _**Soon, little pebble,** _ Yellow says. _**I will return to you soon.** _

“What does that _mean_?” Hunk demands. “Why did you shut me out?”

Sorrow. Pain. Fear. _**Trust Green’s cub. She can help.**_

Green’s cub… Pidge? Something lurks in the corners of Hunk’s mind. Something important. Something about Pidge. What is he forgetting about Pidge?

The door hisses open behind Hunk and he turns, anger stoked. He thought he cut power to the whole castle. No one should be able to come after him. Who--?

Pidge.

Of course.

“Hunk,” she says, hand curling around the edge of the door. She’s too jittery, her eyes darting around the dark hangar like she expects to see something lurking there. She’s not wearing her helmet, so her white hair frames her face in a wild corona, clashing with her amber eyes.

 _Wrong._ That’s wrong. Why is that wrong?

Pidge takes a step forward, then hesitates when Hunk reaches for his bayard. She glances it, then at Hunk, and her lips press into a thin line. “So you remember?”

“Remember what?”

Pidge smiles feebly, drumming her fingers against her leg. Her bayard drops into her palm a moment later, but the motion doesn’t stop. She just keeps tapping, the sound sharper now; metal blade on polymer armor, echoing around the room like the patter of falling rocks in a canyon. It’s a predatory sound, and Hunk— _Hunk_ should be the predator here. The hairs along his arm stand on end as he drops into a ready stance, his hammer held in two hands.

Pidge tilts her head to the side. “Well, I killed you, didn’t I?”

Hunk stops breathing. Pidge killed him? _Pidge_ ? He shakes his head. That’s not right—is it? It was Matt and Coran—no, _Shiro_. It was… _Was_ it Shiro? He was there. He _was_ there. But… so was Pidge. Pidge and Shiro, Shiro trying to kill Pidge. Then Pidge’s hand wrapped around Hunk’s wrist, a dizzying dance, and suddenly the blow meant for Pidge lodged itself in Hunk’s chest.

The images shift subtly, realigning themselves, and Hunk’s vision clears. Pidge hasn’t moved, though her smile has grown wider, more manic.

“You...”

In a heartbeat, she raises her hand and fires her bayard. The blade flashes past Hunk’s head as he throws himself out of the way, heart hammering in his chest. Adrenaline brings with it fury, and he roars as he charges toward Pidge, who pales, whimpers, then turns on her heel and flees.

They race out into the hallway, where the light of Yellow’s barrier fades away and all that remains is the frantic, fluttering glow of Pidge’s bayard, the shaky blue cast of the paladin armor, Hunk’s flickering on the verge of death, and the occasional faint blue strip along the baseboards where Altean emergency lighting marks a door.

Pidge runs for all she’s worth, not slowing to fight. One small sliver of Hunk’s mind retains enough sense to wonder why she came to him to confess, if she meant to run after, but the rest of him is lost in the betrayal. She killed him. _She_ did. He trusted her, protected her, and where did it get him?

Dead. He _was_ dead. Maybe he’s not now, or maybe he’s some sort of spirit caught between life and death, but he means to make use of the time he has left.

The way ahead is clear for Pidge, doors standing open wherever she turns. It doesn’t make sense, doesn’t seem possible, but she runs and she runs and she never comes upon a dead end. It burns at Hunk, tears at him—the _unfairness_ of it. It’s like the world realigns itself to cater to Pidge, while ignoring Hunk. Worse than ignoring him. He doesn’t deserve any of what’s happened to him.

He roars, putting on a burst of speed, and _slams_ into Pidge, ramming her into the wall. The breath leaves her in a wheeze, and she crumples, dropping to her knees as soon as the pressure eases. The neon glow of her armor glints off tears as they slide down her cheeks, and something gleams metallic against her scalp, but she’s back on her feet in an instant, limping, listing, striking faster than she has any right to. Her bayard catches Hunk in the side, a single sharp spear of electricity blotting out the next several moments. When his eyes clear, Pidge is nearly to the next corner.

She’s slower now.

It takes him several turns to be sure, but she’s definitely slower. The arm not holding her bayard is wrapped around her ribs, her shoulders turned inward, and she runs with an uneven, skipping gait that favors her right leg.

She’s hurt. She won’t be able to stay ahead of Hunk long now.

Grinning, he eases his pursuit. There’s nowhere for her to go; they’ve descended into the heart of the castle, far from the Green Lion’s hangar or the main shuttle bays. She can’t get away from him unless she decides to flee into the vents—and if she does that, Hunk will just flood the system with toxic gas; he’s sure he can rig something up in the engine room that will kill a human of her size.

There’s no need to run himself into the ground.

Pidge slows still further, her rattling breath echoing down the hallway, and she glances over her shoulder. Seeing Hunk behind her, she falters, then throws herself through the next door and scrabbles at the controls, fighting to close the door between them. She doesn’t seem to realize that the power outage makes the doors useless—that must be the panic. She knows the end is coming.

Hunk swings for her, and she darts back, flinching as the hammer’s head crumples the door controls. They’re in the main training area, the control booth a shadow in the upper reaches of the room. The room has only one door—the one behind Hunk. Pidge realizes this at the same time as Hunk, and she tenses.

“Stop running, Pidge,” Hunk growls, spinning the hammer in his hand. “I died for you once. Now it’s about time you repaid the favor.”

Pidge backs into something—a low pedestal of some sort. A turret, maybe? Or a target from the last training session? She grabs at it, wincing as she puts pressure on her leg, and positions the pedestal between them.

“You want payback?” she asks, her voice tight with pain. “Fine.”

Suddenly she reverses, dashing toward Hunk, then veering to the side as he raises his hammer. She fires her bayard at the same moment—but it’s not pointed at Hunk. It’s pointed behind her, at the pedestal. The blade sinks in, locking in place as Pidge rounds behind Hunk. She raises her arm, flicking her wrist twice. He sees her ploy too late; two loops of luminous green tether wrap around him, catching at his arms as he tries to wriggle free. Pidge is already back around in front of him, skidding under her cord on her knees. She stumbles as she stands, but her momentum carries her forward, and the cord pulls taut, pinning Hunk’s arms to his side.

He growls, thrashing against the bindings, and he nearly pulls Pidge off her feet before she digs in. She inches forward, retracting her tether as she goes, keeping Hunk helpless. He glares at her, waiting for her to finish him off.

Her expression isn’t what he expected. She’s not scared, or angry. There’s no trace of bloodlust on her face. She just looks… tired.

“Well,” she says, when her slow advance has brought her within inches of his chest. He strains, and his hammer brushes against her leg, but he can’t put any force into the swing. She glances down at it, then looks Hunk in the eye. “Guess it’s time to find out if my theory is right.”

Hunk doesn’t have time to ask what theory she’s talking about. She yanks on her bayard, forcing Hunk into a stumble that puts them on a level, and before he recovers she reaches up and shoves something onto his head. A helmet? No—a headset.

She flicks her wrist, expertly uncoiling the cord. Hunk stumbles free, and the room lights up with shifting fires as electricity races down the length of the cord. It floods the pedestal at the center of the room, which lights up, chirps, and lets out a pulse of blue light.

Hunk recognizes the mind-meld device half a second before something shoves its way into his head with the force of a charging rhino. His vision dims, foreign images flashing behind his eyes. (Foreign? No. Familiar. He recognizes these memories. His own memories. Pidge’s memories.)

“Come on, Hunk,” she grunts. Her bayard is still crackling, the flashing lights making Hunk nauseous. He squeezes his eyes shut, but that only makes the pictures in his head more vivid. Him with Lance and Pidge at the Garrison, bickering as they struggle through another sim run. The three of them on the rooftop. Hunk poking at Pidge’s setup until she snaps at him. The paladins fighting in tandem, Hunk taking a blow that could have crushed Pidge. Her gratitude catches him off guard.

He gasps as pain tears through him. His vision fractures into two copies of the same view, one tinged blue, offset just enough to give him a severe case of vertigo.

“I know you’re still in there, Hunk.”

Pidge. That’s Pidge.

_Small feet balance on his shoulders, his hands wrapped around her ankles. They’re doing maintenance in the lions, and one of the panels they need to access is directly overhead. Nine feet overhead—of course. Not a problem for Alteans, who could just shift themselves Galra and be golden._

_Well, Pidge and Hunk aren’t Alteans, but they have gotten the balancing act down pat._

Something rips him out of the memory, flinging him into someplace darker, shadows leaking golden light. Something is coming for Hunk, hand outstretched, ready to steal his soul, and Pidge just _stands there._ Staring. She doesn’t help.

Coolness floods his veins, bringing to mind a forest stream, fast-flowing and clear. The scene in his memories doesn’t change, but it _deepens_ , blue shadows joining the violet, green light threading through the gold.

_Fear._

It’s not hatred or disdain that hold Pidge back. It’s fear, so overwhelming it freezes her to her bones. Another memory, dimmer than this, presses at him. He doesn’t see it so much as sense it—another fear, another shadow, this one unseen. Hunk’s warmth beside her a steady comfort.

Guilt.

The memory freezes for a moment, and Hunk feels someone tugging at it, trying to hold it back.

Pidge bares her teeth, looking feral in the flickering light of her bayard, and the memory progresses. In it, Pidge shoves her fear aside, moves, slices through the shadow.

“That’s what it is, isn’t it?” Pidge asks, shoving more images into his head. They come too fast to follow, emotions one continuous whip-lash of fear-joy-sorrow-rage-contentment as the weeks bleed into an unintelligible stream. It’s only at the very end that the violet ink bleeds into them, warping them into something _different._ “It’s not just Hunk in there anymore. I can feel you, you know. You’re the thing that was chasing us before.”

 _No,_ Hunk wants to say. _You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re just trying to confuse me. You’re the enemy. I shouldn’t—shouldn’t--_

_**Trust Green’s cub.** _

Yellow’s words. (But Yellow betrayed him. Why should Hunk listen to him now?)

“You know what?” Pidge spreads her feet, face set with a stubbornness Hunk knows too well. It flickers through his memories, and on the inside, Pidge softens at the fondness laced through Hunk’s thoughts. She smiles—warm inside, but cold as rime in the unsteady light of the castle. “I don’t really care. I just want you to get the fuck out of my friend.”

She screams, driving home one final memory with the force of a cannon shot:

Pidge. Crumpled. Curled around Hunk’s dead body, sobbing so hard it rips the air right out of her. _My fault._ The thought hangs in the air, drifts on the currents of the rift. _My fault._ She clings to him, broken. _I should have died instead._

Something breaks.

For a moment, there are two of him. Two Hunks, one consumed with vengeance, one who wants nothing more than to crush Pidge to him and tell her it’s okay, it’s _okay_ , he would do it all again in a heartbeat.

The two minds recognize each other and recoil, and another presence slides into the gap with a rumble that vibrates right down to the tips of Hunk’s toes.

Yellow.

He came.

Tears spring to Hunk’s eyes as he surrenders himself to Yellow’s voice, tumbling end over end as he tears through him. The lion sinks teeth into Hunk’s mind, and for the longest instant he thinks he’ll be torn apart—but it’s not Hunk that tears away, shrieking and writhing and flickering gold-black-violet.

It’s a shadow, shriveled and petty, with ember eyes that glare malicious through the dark.

The electricity vanishes from Pidge’s bayard, and she whips it around, releasing the mind meld pedestal. Her presence fades from Hunk’s mind, and he misses it at once, but Pidge is moving lightning-fast, shooting at something Hunk can’t see for the darkness. The lightning returns, and faint blue ghostlights fill the air. The shadow surges forward, only to hit a wall.

A flicker of blue. The shadow screams.

“Invisible maze, bitch,” Pidge says, a laugh in her weary voice. “But don’t worry. I made sure there’s no exit this time. Check and fucking _mate_.”

She turns, worry plain on her face as she searches Hunk, questions tripping off her tongue. He can hardly make sense of them; he feels hollowed out, his mind in tatters, his body battered and drained. The Yellow Lion remains entrenched in his mind, a guardian beast prowling the edges of his consciousness as though to keep out any future invaders.

He’ll keep Hunk’s mind safe, as Pidge will guard his body.

Content in this knowledge, he closes his eyes and surrenders himself to the darkness.


	5. Bloodied Hands

“Hunk?” Pidge calls, her eyes still fixed on the Hunter. “Hunk? Please don’t tell me you’re dead again. Please?”

She glances to the side for just an instant—just long enough to be sure that Hunk still lies where he fell. He’s there, and she thinks she can hear him breathing. It’s hard to tell, considering how winded she is. (To be fair, though, she _did_ just sprint the length of the castle three times, once injured, and _wow_ , she should make a note not to play chicken with Hunk again. She’s pretty sure he broke something.)

It’s still pitch black in here, except for the frantic light of her bayard, and the shadows do nothing for her scarcely-contained terror. She’d go see about restoring power, except right now she _is_ the power source for the Hunter’s prison. It’s a serious flaw in her plan, she knows, but there wasn’t time to track down a battery. She had a hard enough time programming the trap.

So she stands here, finger aching from holding the trigger on her bayard. She edges toward Hunk, careful not to pull her line too close to the walls of the invisible maze. Altean tech is remarkable for its ability to draw power from nearly any source, but Pidge isn’t keen on finding out what happens if she creates a short. When she’s close enough, she stretches out one foot to nudge Hunk’s leg.

“Hunk?”

He groans, pressing his face into the crook of his arm, and Pidge’s relief leaves her boneless, knees traitorously weak.

“So you’re _not_ dead,” she says shakily. “That’s good. That’s—that’s _good_! Not dead is… good. You, uh, you aren’t still all evil and stuff, are you? That’s be just my luck. Go through all this just to find out the demon possession thing was secondary to whatever else is happening. Fuck. I didn’t really think this through, did I? I should--”

“Pidge?”

Pidge cuts off. “Yeah?”

“Could we maybe save the self-evaluation for later? My head feels like it’s about to explode.”

“Yeah,” Pidge says with a smile. “Yeah, we can do that.”

Hunk grunts again, then sits up, cradling his head in his hands. “What happened?”

“You don’t remember?”

He shakes his head, then moans and curls in on himself. “Ohh, that was a bad idea.” He swallows audibly, then tries again. “No. I don’t really remember anything after… uh… we were in another reality? I think? Lance was dead.”

“Don’t think about it too hard, okay?” Pidge says quickly, because they still have things to deal with, including an inter-dimensional demon locked in a very precarious cage and a castle with no power and a bazillion locked doors that, most likely, no one besides the two of them know how to hack. Maybe it’s selfish and insensitive of her, but she’d like to put off Hunk’s inevitable panic attack until she’s better equipped to handle it. “We’re home, and everyone’s okay--” (She _hopes_ everyone is okay; she doesn’t actually know what happened to freak Matt out so bad, but Hunk doesn’t need to know that right now.) “Lance didn’t die here. But what about you? You think you’re good to go see about fixing the power? Or do you want to rest a little more?”

Hunk lifts his head, looking around the room like he only just realized they’re sitting in the dark. “I think...” He pauses, brow furrowing. “I did this.”

“What?” Pidge scoffs. “No way, Hunk. This was all Lu-space-ifer’s doing.”

Hunk follows her gesture to the Hunter, and Pidge realizes forcing him to confront the thing that just turned him against his friends is probably not the best thing right now. He freezes, the blood draining from his face, and Pidge waves her hand to catch his attention.

“Sorry,” she says. “Look, as long as the power’s out, I’ve got to stay here and keep this thing’s prison up, and I’m not sure where the others were when the power outage hit, but I’m guessing they’re stuck there, which means you’re going to have to be the one to fix it. As soon as you’re feeling up to it.”

It takes a moment, but he nods, and with one last look at the Hunter, he turns and heads for the door. She relaxes once he’s gone, grateful that Lance ripped off Hunk’s helmet as soon as they made it out of the rift. Coran stuffed it somewhere, she thinks, but the point is Hunk doesn’t have it, which means he won’t be able to reach the others the second the comms come back online—which is good, because Pidge doesn’t want him to be alone when he finds out what he did while he wasn’t himself.

Pidge’s helmet is stashed in the corner of the training deck—she needed it off to fit the mind-meld headset—and when, a good ten minutes later, the lights flicker on, she hesitates only long enough to be sure the invisible maze is holding before she dashes over and trades the headset for the helmet. The Hunter’s eerie gaze prickles at the back of her neck as she connects to the med bay.

“Matt?” she asks. “Matt, are you there?”

“Pidge!” That’s Keith, though she hears cursing and a clatter in the background that sounds suspiciously like her brother. “Where are you? Have you seen Hu--?”

“ _Are you okay?_ ” Matt’s voice is breathless, his words tumbling out in a frantic mess. “When the comms went out I thought—I didn’t know if— _Where are you?_ I’m—Are the doors unlocked now? Have you _checked_? No, never mind, I’ll do it myself.”

The last sentence fades, like Matt’s walking away from the microphone, and Pidge smiles to herself as she sits down, her back against the wall, eyes closed. The ache in her ribs is stronger than before, her adrenaline high long gone. Half her body is a bruise by now, probably, but she can deal with that later. Distantly, she hears Keith trying to talk Matt down from a panic attack.

“Sorry,” Allura says. “We’ve had an eventful thirty doboshes. Matt tried to crawl through the vents.”

Pidge snorts. “And how did that work out for him?”

“Not… _particularly_ well...”

That would probably be the crash she heard when the comms came back, then. She wonders how many times he’d already fallen. Her humor soon fades, however, and she shoots a glance at the door. She’s not sure how far Hunk had to go to get somewhere he could fix the ship’s power, but he’ll probably be back soon and there are a few things she needs to know before that happens.

“Is everyone else there? Are you all okay?”

“Well enough,” says Allura. “Actually—” There’s a woosh, and Coran murmurs something Pidge doesn’t quite catch. “That’s Lance now.”

Energy floods Pidge’s system, a torrent too much like the storm of Quintessence that had only just begun to fade. She grips her ankles, nails biting into the skin, and stares at nothing. “Lance?” she asks, horrific images of Hunk battling Lance flickering through her mind. _Not that. Anything but that._ Hunk will never forgive himself if— “What happened?”

“Hunk was… different when he came out of the pod,” Allura says. “Violent. He seems to think he has to protect Lance from the rest of us. He attacked Shiro first. I didn’t see it, but, well, the scans weren’t pleasant.”

“How unpleasant? Wait—the power outage! Shit, the pods--”

“Have their own backup power supply,” Allura says. “Shiro is perfectly all right. His arm is broken, but according to Keith he stopped the worst of the blow to the head. A minor concussion is all.”

“And he’ll be fine?”

“He’ll be fine. Another varga in the cryopod. Pidge--”

“What about Lance?”

“I’m fine, Pidge.” Lance’s voice is still groggy from cryosleep, but she can’t detect any lingering pain or resentment. “Just a flesh wound.” She snorts, and Lance’s voice carries a smile when he goes on. “I wasn’t even going to bother with the pods, but then we got trapped in here and the others promised to pull me out if anything changed. I’m more worried about Hunk. Have you seen him? Is he okay?”

“He’s fine,” Pidge says. She cocks her head to the side, considering the Hunter, which seems to have crouched down in its cage to wait this out. “Fine-ish. I just need to know that I didn’t lie to him when I said you were all okay.”

The shouting in the background tapers off. Pidge isn’t sure if Matt and Keith heard any of what she’s been saying, or if someone else shut them up, but suddenly the comms are silent, everyone focused on her.

It’s Keith who speaks up first. “So… he’s _not_ trying to kill us anymore?”

“ _He_ never was.” Pidge sighs as a confused silence greets this statement. “Is ‘demonic possession’ enough of an answer for you, or should I start at the beginning?”

“A little context would be nice, yes,” Matt says. “You know what this was?”

“I can guess.” Pidge meets the Hunter’s eyes, suppressing a shudder. Even from here, she can feel the pull of the rift through those eyes, and she pulls her legs closer against her chest. “There was something in the rift. A shadow-creature that hunts down people who end up in the wrong reality. Green calls it a Hunter. Considering the things she showed me, and the way all the lions flipped out when Hunk went for Yellow, I think they’ve seen this thing before. Actually, I think it’s been hunting Voltron ever since the comet first appeared. I don’t know if the comet came through a rift or if the Hunter just doesn’t like the way it warps reality around itself, but… yeah. There’s some bad blood there.”

Allura makes a sound of protest, but she can’t seem to formulate a question. Pidge waits patiently until Coran speaks up instead. “I don’t understand. If this thing has been hunting Voltron for ten thousand years, why hasn’t it succeeded?”

“Best guess?” Pidge asks. “It needs an open rift to get through, or a body that passes _through_ the rift for it to possess. That’s why we didn’t see it when we found the second comet. Oh, also: we’re gonna need to figure out a way to take this thing back into the rift, and then we should destroy the rift for good.”

“This thing?” Keith asks. He sounds like he doesn’t want to hear the answer, but Pidge gives it to him anyway.

“I’ve got it trapped in the invisible maze. It was inside Hunk—that’s why he was acting so… Zarkon-y.” She pauses. “Literally, actually. I’ll have to do some more digging, but I think there’s actually a pretty good chance that Zarkon’s obsession with the Black Lion is tied to this Hunter thing and the fact that both Zarkon and Hunk died in the rift. Like… it lowered their defenses or something. I think these things tried to possess me, too, but there was too much _me_ for them to take control. Or… something. Hm. I wonder if there’s a way to test that _without_ risking another possession...”

“Pidge,” Keith snaps. “Focus. You said you got this Hunter thing out of Hunk somehow?”

Pidge nods, though he can’t see her. “Hunk was still in there. I just had to draw him to the surface with the mind meld, and Yellow did the rest.”

“I don’t really care how you did it,” Keith says. His bluntness makes Pidge smile despite the unease growing in her gut. Shouldn’t Hunk be back by now? “The point is, Hunk is himself again? You’re sure?”

“I mean, we should probably scan him to be sure. But it’s kinda hard to confuse glowy-eyed and Hulk-smashing me into walls with nauseous and guilty as fuck, so take that how you will.”

Matt sucks in a sharp breath. “When you say Hulk-smashing you into walls...”

Pidge grimaces, pushing herself to her feet. Her whole body protests, and the floor tilts under her, but she catches her balance on the wall well enough to start the trek out the door. “Yeah, I’m thinking probably cryopod later. But first I need to find Hunk and make sure he knows he didn’t kill anyone.”

She ignores the commotion on the comms as Lance clamors to know more about Hunk’s condition and Keith demands to know why she _doesn’t_ know where Hunk is. It’s too much noise, and her head is starting to pound the way it does when she’s just hyper-focused on a program for ten hours and it suddenly hits her that she stayed up so late she’s already missed breakfast.

Of course. The one time she could do with the manic energy of the rift, and _now_ it’s finally worked its way through her system. It occurs to her that Quintessence is a healing power, that Hunk body-slammed her with enough force that walking right now should be more than a little unpleasant, and that the two might possibly be connected.

She’s three turns away from the training deck before she thinks to check her armor’s scanners, and of course she’s headed away from the faint signal coming off Hunk’s suit. She groans, turns around, and heads back the other way.

She finds him in the middle of the hallway, head between his knees, a puddle of vomit not far away. The smell of it makes Pidge queasy, but she forces her stomach to settle and crosses to Hunk’s side.

“I remember,” he whispers almost at once. His voice is soft and scratchy, his hands tugging at his hair, and Pidge’s heart twinges. “I think I—Oh, quiznak. I think I killed Shiro.”

“You didn’t,” Pidge says. She reaches out for him, then thinks better of it and pulls off her helmet instead. “He’s in a pod, but Allura says he’ll be out in an hour, no harm done. You want to talk to them?”

He sniffles. “Not really...” he says, even as he takes the helmet. He stares at it for a long moment, running a thumb along the rim as he contemplates it. “They must hate me.”

Pidge scowls at the floor. “They don’t. I told them what happened. About the thing from the rift, that it was possessing you. I think at this point they just want to know you’re okay. Hell, Lance is probably sprinting around the castle looking for you.” She scratches her cheek. “I… might have been too tired to give them a lot of details.”

Hunk snorts, wipes his nose, and settles the helmet over his head. His hands are shaking. Pidge touches his elbow, and when their eyes lock, she leans into him, silently offering comfort. She’s not as good at this as Hunk, but she’s trying, and he seems to appreciate the effort.

Breathing in, Hunk clears his throat. “Guys?”

The response is immediate, voices overlapping in a cacophony Pidge can hear with her head pressed against Hunk’s shoulder. Lance’s cry of, _Hunk!,_ rings out above the rest, and Hunk smothers a sob with his fist. Pidge holds him tighter, her fingers digging into the broken hole in his breastplate as his whole body shakes and shudders with emotion run rampant.

“You’re okay,” she whispers, eyes burning. “We’re all okay.”

* * *

It’s three minutes before Lance gets there. Three awful, nauseating minutes with Pidge clinging to his side and Matt repeating endless reassurances on the comms and Pidge echoing them, her voice so thick with tears Hunk can barely make out one word in three.

That’s okay. Hunk’s even less coherent. He manages Shiro’s name, and Coran repeats what Pidge already told him: not dead, but not yet awake.

He’s going to hate Hunk when he gets out of the pod, but that’s okay, too. Hunk deserves it.

After that, all Hunk can manage is an endless litany of apologies that break apart into sobs and leave him shuddering and wrung-out, holding Pidge so tight she’s probably going to bruise.

Hunk apologizes for that, too.

He doesn’t let go, though. Not until Lance comes careening around the corner. His face is scrunched up, his eyes already rimmed in red, and Hunk’s heart breaks a little at the tear in his suit along his ribs. (That part’s still fuzzy, but Hunk’s pretty sure that was his fault, too.)

“Hunk,” Lance breathes, the name escaping on a rush of air, like somebody just punched him in the gut. Hunk releases Pidge and begins to haul himself to his feet, but Lance doesn’t wait that long. He flings himself at Hunk, arms locking tight around Hunk’s neck, and Hunk drops back to the ground, his aching body protesting the blow.

Lance’s breath is hot and humid on Hunk’s neck, his voice muffled by skin and armor and tears.

“You’re okay.” Lance has to repeat it three times before Hunk can parse the words, but once he does his breath hitches, and he tightens his grip on Lance.

“Yeah,” Hunk says. “I guess so.”

Lance pulls back, his bottom lip jutting out in something between a pout and a scowl. “You _will_ be okay, then. Okay? You’re here, and you’re you, and—and that’s all that matters.” His voice treads a fine line, wobbling right on the very edge of composure, and Hunk holds his breath, afraid a single wrong word will shatter him. (Doesn’t matter. Lance’s face crumples in the next moment anyway, tears welling over and slipping down his cheeks.) “You were _dead_ , Hunk. I was too late, and you were dead, and there was nothing--”

His voice breaks. Hunk’s heart tries to do the same. He drops his head onto Lance’s shoulder, mouth open, but no words come to him. He knows how Lance is feeling. Knows what it’s like to lose your best friend, to feel powerless.

But he can’t say that. He can’t—He can’t do that to Shiro. Hunk only _almost_ killed one of his best friends. The other Shiro succeeded in killing three. And if the blazing coal of guilt lodged in Hunk’s windpipe is a reliable standard, it won’t matter to Shiro at all that it wasn’t actually him.

Pidge’s hand presses against Hunk’s back, comforting. Commiserating. After what just happened, she has to be in a lot of pain and not a little scared of Hunk, but she’s here, and Hunk can’t wrap his head around how important that is.

There’s a shuffling sound, and Hunk lifts his head off Lance’s shoulder to find Keith standing awkwardly a few feet away. He’s got his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes almost as puffy as Lance’s, but he won’t look Hunk in the eye.

That’s okay, too. Shiro is everything to Keith, and Hunk came dangerously close to taking that away. He’s got every right to be upset.

“I’m sorry.”

The words catch Hunk off guard, not least of all because Keith beat him to it. He frowns, thoughts running thick as molasses as Keith wrestles with his next words.

“I didn’t--” Keith breaths in, sharp and shaky. “I wasn’t trying to kill you.”

Hunk goes breathless again as another sliver of memory slides back into place. Keith, Lance, and Hunk. A tangle of limbs and raging emotions. Keith’s sword disappearing into Hunk’s chest. His next breath is rattled, and he presses a hand to his chest before he can think about what he’s doing.

Keith flinches. “I wasn’t—You were already dead! You—you _were_ dead, and then you weren’t, and Shiro was—I was scared out of my mind, Hunk. I wasn’t thinking straight. I didn’t—I didn’t want to—” He stops, hugging himself tighter. “I’m sorry.”

Hunk wonders whether his own guilt sounds this ridiculous to his friends. He can’t say for sure, but Keith’s apology is more comforting than it has any right to be, and Hunk manages a broken little laugh as he holds out a hand toward Keith, who jumps, eyes watering. He looks up from the hand, meets Hunk’s eyes, and staggers forward, one hand giving up its death grip on his armor to take a hold of Hunk’s.

As soon as he has a grip, Hunk tugs, and Keith trips over his feet, falling atop Hunk and Lance and Pidge. Hunk doesn’t let himself think about what he did, about how he hurt his friends. They’re _all_ hurting, all scared, all tired.

Hunk won’t be the one to deprive any of them of the tattered little support system that’s pulled them through this far.

“It’s okay, man,” he whispers, letting go of Keith’s hand to fold him into the hug. “You did what you had to do. I’d never forgive myself if I’d actually—if Shiro wasn’t--”

Hunk breaks off, but Keith seems to get the gist of it. The tension in his spine melts away, and he threads his arms around Hunk. “Yeah. I’d never forgive myself, either—if I’d really killed you.”

“We get it.” Pidge sniffs, the sound somehow accusatory. She’s tucked herself under Hunk’s arm, one hand on his back, the other sneaking up to latch onto Keith. Lance shifts a moment later, reaching around Keith and squeezing Pidge’s wrist. Pidge shudders, her voice going soft around the edges. “We’re all here, we’re all messed up, we all feel terrible--”

“And we’re all alive,” Lance says. “Shiro, too. And he’ll be just as happy to see the rest of us when he gets out of the pod.” Hunk’s stomach curls, and this time Lance and Pidge both respond, Pidge rubbing circles on his back and Lance leaning his forehead against Hunk’s. “That goes double for you,” he says.

Hunk smiles, but it doesn’t reach to the cold block of dread at his center.

They’re alive, though. That’s what really matters. He’ll deal with the rest when the time comes.

* * *

Hunk doesn’t relax until Shiro emerges from the pod.

Pidge beats him by about five minutes, the Quintessence she absorbed from the rift having given her a head-start. Hunk tries to apologize to her for smashing her like a stress ball, but she tugs on the tails of his headband to shut him up and says, in no uncertain terms, that he has no business apologizing for what the Hunter did.

They’ve transferred it to a cryopod, apparently. Hunk won’t go anywhere near it, but Allura says they put it in one of the pods from the lower decks, where memories are extracted. Those pods are designed to eject from the castle—part of the Altean funeral rites, according to Coran. It makes sense for a ship with no cemetery, even if it turns Hunk’s stomach to think that they might have ejected _him_ into the incomprehensible vastness of space if he didn’t wake up when he did.

The pod is air-tight, so the Hunter can’t escape, and it’ll make it easy to jettison it into the rift just as soon as Hunk and Pidge are present to complete the Voltron formation and destroy the rift once and for all. But first…

Shiro tenses when he realizes who it is that caught him. Just for a moment, but Hunk is ready for it, and Shiro isn’t quite awake enough to hide his reaction. Keith, Pidge, Lance, and Allura are all there as a combination of moral support and damage control, depending on how this goes down, but they agreed to hang back at first. As terrified as Hunk is of finding out that he ruined his friendship with Shiro, he needs to do this. He needs to know.

“How are you feeling?” he asks cautiously as Shiro straightens up.

Shiro’s brow furrows, but his eyes have already cleared. He takes stock of the situation: Hunk, back in his civilian clothes, supporting him with a hand under his arm and another settled loosely around his back. Keith relaxed but watchful beside Lance, whose optimism Hunk can sense from across the room, and Allura, who's more subdued. Pidge, restless, biting her lip to keep from jumping in and explaining everything to Shiro before he can arrive at the wrong conclusion. She stays quiet, for which Hunk is grateful, and Shiro’s eyes finally return to Hunk.

“I’m fine,” he says with a small smile. “I guess I should have seen that coming.”

Hunk frowns. “What?”

“We all know what happened to Zarkon and Haggar after they ventured into the rift. I should have known something similar happened with you.” Shiro straightens, flexing the arm that was broken. He looks up at Hunk, a troubled look in his eye. “So it’s reversible.”

All Hunk can do is nod. They haven’t talked about the implications yet, but Hunk, at least, can’t stop thinking about them. They’ll need to look into it more, of course—just because they could undo the rift-possession-whatever after an hour doesn’t mean the same holds true after ten thousand years—and even if they _can_ , would it really be a kindness to free Zarkon and Honerva from this, to make them face everything the Empire has done?

Hunk doesn’t have answers for that, but he feels more sympathy for the two biggest threats to life and freedom in the universe than he would have thought possible. It’s not a comfortable feeling, but then, neither is knowing that he almost killed one of his best friends.

As if sensing his thoughts, Shiro pulls Hunk into an embrace, squeezing gently with his prosthetic. “Details can wait,” he whispers. “I’m just glad to have you back. I thought--” He hesitates, then shakes his head. Hunk, face buried in Shiro’s shoulder as fresh tears work their way to the surface, only feels the motion. “I wish I could have stopped this from happening.”

Unspoken words hang heavy in the air. Lance and Keith have both already asked—repeatedly, in Keith’s case—what Hunk meant when he said that Shiro killed Lance. That he killed Hunk. Fortunately, Pidge was there to intervene, brushing heavy questions off with a curt, “We saw things in the rift. Other realities, freaky shit. It doesn’t matter.”

It’s not enough; Hunk can feel the questions still pressing at the still air. They've already guessed most of it, and he’ll need to tell them the rest eventually--he _will_ , if only so they can make sure their Shiro doesn't go the same way as the other--but not today. Not with Shiro clinging to him like, well, like he’s all too aware of how close he came to losing Hunk. Not with Pidge creeping up behind. She’s hardly left Hunk’s side since he came back to himself, except for the short time she spent in the pod. He suspects it will be a while before either of them can put this nightmare behind him. Even the quiet shushing of the air in the vents, in the lonely silence that followed Pidge going under, was enough to make Hunk’s skin crawl.

But for now, this is enough. Lance is quick to get in on the hug, followed by Allura, and even Keith steps up, laying a hand on Shiro’s shoulder and another on Hunk’s. Coran should be back soon to go over the scan he ran on Hunk an hour ago. He tried to explain it then, but Hunk couldn’t focus. The tone was generally positive, though; he gathered that much.

He’s… okay. Not great, not yet, but he has time to get there. His friends will make sure of that.

* * *

Sleep eludes him that night. The ship is quiet, the darkness absolute. Hunk lies on his bed, in his room, the familiar trappings of home all around him.

He feels like he’s back on the other side of the rift, the Hunter watching him from the shadows. When he lies down, he can even hear its voice, telling him to stop running, to let it put an end to his suffering. He shivers and imagines shadowy hands hovering over his shoulders.

So he sits, knees hugged to his chest, the lamp beside his bed keeping the darkest shadows at bay, and waits for the hours to tick by. He knows he can’t just _never_ sleep again, but maybe for now, maybe just for one night… Maybe by tomorrow night, he’ll be exhausted enough to sleep without his mind conjuring threats that no longer exist. Not in this reality, anyway. They sent the Hunter back into the rift an hour before they all headed off in search of sleep, and all traces of the rift are gone.

That doesn’t change the anxiety clawing at his throat or the imagined voices whispering in his ear.

The door slides open with a soft hydraulic _swish_ , and the brighter light of corridor spills across Hunk’s bedroom floor. He looks up, not at all surprised to find Pidge standing there, dressed in her pajamas and bath robe, one bare foot crossed over the other, her bayard dangling limp from one hand.

Their eyes meet, and Pidge doesn’t have to say a word. Hunk raises one side of the blanket he’s pulled around himself, and Pidge hurries forward, fear lending her speed. She latches onto his side as the door slides silently shut.

“We’re safe,” Pidge says, stubbornness fraying around the edges. She sounds tired—so tired—and Hunk scrambles to remember when was the last time she slept. Not for the whole time they were in that other reality. Not since they’ve returned, as far as Hunk knows. Except for the twenty minutes in the cryopod, she’s been up for—how long now? Forty hours? Longer?

Hunk pulls her tight against his side. “We are.” He guides her head down onto his shoulder and rests his chin atop her hair. She politely ignores the tremor in his hand as he rubs her arm. “You’re just tired. A little bit of sleep is all you need. Everything will look better in the morning.”

Pidge snorts, but doesn’t call him on his blatant hypocrisy. “That might be a tall order.”

“Sleep?”

She grunts.

“Well then forget about sleep. We’ll just talk.”

“Just talk,” Pidge says, skeptical. “About what?”

Hunk takes a moment to think about that. Just having Pidge here, a warm, constant presence at his side to remind him what's real, something inside him is starting to unwind. Her voice seeps into his skin and spreads through his body, lulling him toward sleep. “If you could turn into any animal, which one would you pick?”

Pidge is still for a long moment, the question percolating through her sleep-deprived mental filters. Then she laughs, smothering the sound in Hunk’s shirt. “You wanna do ice breakers all night?”

“I just wanted to keep it chill,” he says, grinning.

Pidge punches him in the side, but there’s no strength behind it. She melts into him a little more, nuzzling deeper. “You’re horrible,” she says through a yawn. “And so are your puns.”

“I try.”

Silence swells between them, but it’s a comfortable silence, devoid of phantom voices. Pidge rises and falls in time with Hunk’s breathing, her own breaths drifting into an easy synchronicity. Hunk drowses, his mind wandering. He teeters, for a moment, on the edge of an abyss, and his breath catches.

Pidge’s arms squeeze him around the middle, grounding him. “A mouse.”

Hunk makes an indistinct noise he hopes comes across as a question.

“If I could turn into any animal,” Pidge clarifies. “I’d be a mouse. A space mouse, specifically, because they’re super smart _and_ kinda psychic. It’d be awesome.”

“It would be.”

Another long pause, and then Pidge yawns. “My turn?”

“Your turn,” Hunk says.

“Dream planet. If you could design a planet from the ground up, what would it look like?”

Hunk breathes out, considering that. His mind begins to wander again as he describes this fantasy planet of his—warm sun, beautiful sunsets, with a perfect beach to visit with Lance and a mountain range dotted with flower-filled valleys. It’s a comfortable drifting this time, though. Like he's lifting out of his body, floating an inch off the bed.

They continue like that for… Hunk doesn’t know how long. Six questions, seven, back and forth like some sort of slow-mo ping pong match. Somewhere between favorite book and imaginary friends, Pidge drifts off, her lips slightly parted as she slumps against Hunk. He stares down at her, lids heavy and chest warm.

This is good. This is safe. And it’s oddly heartening to know that _she_ feels safe with _him_ , even after everything.

He shifts, holding Pidge as still as possible, and she barely stirs as he lays them both down, side by side on the bed. Shadows still lurk at the edges of the room, plucking at his awareness—but at least for tonight, they’re far enough away, and he’s tired enough that the darkness only registers as a fleeting thought that fades away as Pidge breathes out a sigh.

 _I’m here,_ he thinks. _I’m alive, and I’m not alone._

For now, that’s enough, and before the warmth of Pidge's trust has faded, Hunk, too, drifts off to sleep.


End file.
